What’s Immersive, Engaging and has Tech All Over?
If you’ve clicked on the title, you’re clearly someone who is curious. Maybe you’re the pharma sales trainer tasked with being innovative, including finding new ways to transform boring things – like power point slides as part of your sales training – into interactive learning opportunities. Perhaps you’re trying to maximize ROI on your staff and your technical solutions as your organization continues to navigate through these challenging times: many individuals and organizations are taking this time of uncertainty as an opportunity to upskill. Whatever your reason is for clicking, let’s get to the answer.
Keeping People Safe
The world has never before rallied around a common enemy – and theme – in our known history. COVID-19 has wreaked immeasurable havoc and the collective theme of staying safe has become all pervasive from salutations to how we do our jobs. What was previously ordinary has, literally overnight, become extraordinary.
Sanitation workers have complex new protocols and standards to meet. Delivery and other essential workers supporting the heightened research effort to find a cure and develop a vaccine have had to change how they work. Clinical trials can’t stop! Especially not now. Today, they’re more important than ever, but pharma has rarely had to develop their clinical trial protocols to include guidelines on keeping their trial administrators and healthcare staff safe.
For the most part, everyone has adapted to this “new normal” but there are many unknown questions and possible outcomes as we attempt to “return to normal.” Coming back online as a society will be phased in over the coming months (or longer) and policies, protocols, procedures and trainings will have to be as bendable as bamboo. Keeping people safe is Priority #1 for all employers and government officials. However, to do so, traditional sales training needs to be converted to a virtual offering. In addition to going digital, it’s also going to need to be dynamic so that it can quickly flex and bend as new data inform new required behaviors.
Transforming the Boring
For many of our pharma clients, boring or not, they are required by law and governing policies to conduct training to ensure compliance with existing regulations. We all know that non-compliant organizations tend to have shorter life spans. There’s no way around the sales training, it needs to be done. People have high expectations and, if they’re going to invest their time to learn, they want their sales training to be:
- Engaging;
- High quality;
- Tailored to their specific use-cases.
In many cases, the pharma sales trainer may already have the content. However, that sales training content may benefit from an updated format. One of the most straightforward and effective ways to do that to maximize the ROI invested in originally producing the training is to incorporate new technology to make it fresh and more engaging.
Turning Things up a Notch
All industries have reported disengagement of their workforce as the pandemic has continued to wage its war against the world. Employers are raising concerns about getting reasonable productivity out of their staff. How do you engage a global population that has grown accustomed to waking up whenever, spending the bulk of their day in their jammies and streaming endless content from Netflix? Especially in an era when “zoom fatigue” has become a clinical symptom.
People are craving something different. Virtual reality, emerging tech and an immersive learning environment can stimulate the workforce again, gives people purpose and keep them engaged. So, to finally answer the question, what’s immersive, engaging and has tech all over? An e-learning experience that will boost employee performance, meet compliance requirements, and, most of all, keep people safe.
