Shifting gears from ‘Room to Zoom’ was not easy but we did it!

Touching mid 50's and mid 60’s, my senior colleague and I dared to move out of our high profile jobs to set up a training organisation for Corporates. Our main motivation was to help them achieve results with relationships’. We were excited because we knew our stuff well and all we had to do was to reach out to our clients for trainings. We were received very well by our clients and we kickstarted with good number of training programmes and sufficient traction on the same. We felt proud of our decision and we had soon transformed into a legal entity as well. However our enthusiasm was too short-lived. On March 22, 2020 an official lockdown was announced. For some time, it did not hit us but soon we realised dark clouds were looming on us .

By July 2020, we were shocked to see that the training vocabulary had completely changed. Trainings were called Webinars, Training rooms were changed to Platform zoom, Trainers were being addressed as Speakers , the slide show changed to share screen, human faces were now blank squares with names, participants had lost their voice because they were all muted and rarely unmuted, doubts were changed to chat / raise hands and a good feedback was changed to clap .I was even more surprised when ‘Zoom‘ decided to give bio breaks after every 40 mins which once was our prerogative.

We could not comprehend ‘zoom’ technology because as trainers of the old school, technology to us was restricted to PPTs / videos. We were best at blending theory with experiential learning but were not prepared for change in pedagogy. We both felt like amateurs after more than 22 years of teaching . We felt lost, frustrated and stressed during the sessions. No matter how much we tried, we could not befriend ‘zoom or its contemporaries. We were on the verge of quitting and thought of packing our bags.

However good sense prevailed on us . Inspired by words of Sir Winston Churchill, ‘If you are going through hell, keep going’, we decided to retrain our training muscles with a do-the-new attitude. We approached ‘Zoom’ with a freshers mindset and gave repeated auditions to each other followed by a candid review. We recorded our talks and quite honestly we looked like monsters with wide eyes popping on the screen with our slide screen running here and there. In real time sessions, we made many faux pas and the worst was when we would forget to ‘Allow’ participants. Fortunately our participants were very forgiving and excused us for our small slips. Some of them did not notice our follies for they too were new to ‘zoom’.

But with every training completed on ‘zoom’, we got better and better till we decided to become a permanent member of ‘zoom family’ by taking annual membership. In return we got some advanced features like seamless sessions, breakout rooms etc which gave some semblance to on site trainings.

Now we felt evolved and empowered having successfully transfer our old wines in the new bottles. We replaced outbound management games with online activities, we cheered participants with emoticons , we steered case discussions in breakout rooms and finally we happily closed each day with screenshots of all participants. Today we are happy to complete 14 trainings at reputed PSUs and we are sure many more will follow.

The two lessons i learnt from my short stint with technology. First is that the gadgets and apps we use soon become friends to us and the more time we spent with them thicker we get wth them. The second lesson I learnt was, while screen trainings are being labeled as a poor cousin of face to face trainings but we have to agree with Nehru, ‘training is expensive, no training is more expensive’ . Therefore in the New Normal online trainings may be ‘Low-Touch’ but no trainings will be ‘No-Touch’.