Rethinking training and inductions for remote working

COVID-19 has fast tracked a new way of conducting business with a much greater reliance on remote working. In this new world of work, there are some practices that have mostly fallen away waiting for the resumption of our old way of working. One of these practices is the induction and training of new board and committee members.

We take a closer look at board induction and training and question whether there are not more optimal remote-learning alternatives that could be adopted.

When a new member joins your board, a proper induction would include the following:

Training on their duties and responsibilities and the regulations that govern these;
Information on the workings of your enterprise and how to access important documents;
Background information on recent issues and board decisions that are often contained in past meeting minutes; and
Introductions to the enterprise stakeholders and service providers.

A central electronic platform for storing all past meeting packs and enterprise documents would offer an invaluable resource for new board members. You could also include an area on the platform for the storage of industry and regulatory changes. So instead of emailing this information to board members, the information could be loaded onto the platform and the board members made aware of its presence via an email. This provides a resource for both new and existing board members.

While there is no limit to the volume of information that can be stored on an electronic platform, a new board member might find it difficult to locate the documents that are relevant to a particular topic. We have solved this problem in a number of innovative ways on the SC Spheres platform:

There is a powerful search facility that is structured so a user can quickly locate any document or meeting minute stored on the platform;
Important documents can be grouped together in a menu-style structure on the platform that can act as a virtual assistant for users when navigating documents;
Training modules can be built on the platform in a chat-style format that can support self-learning for users.

All of the features on SC Spheres come standard and are included in the one monthly subscription fee. Our commitment is to ensure that the platform functionality is continually extended to support our customers as they embrace the new world of work that we find ourselves in.