Employer-employee relationships define a workplace and affect every job experience. Establishing trust — through recruitment, onboarding and ongoing career development — makes or breaks a company’s culture and bottom line. Cloud-based virtual learning labs are a catalyst for rebuilding employee trust in training, and employers are finally getting on board.

Trust matters. It’s a timeless concept that has been a cornerstone of successful organizations across every industry. Employer-employee relationships define a workplace and have a positive or negative impact on every aspect of a person’s job experience. Setting the tone early — from day one of recruitment, to hiring and onboarding, to ongoing skills and career development — will undoubtedly define a company’s culture, as well as its bottom line.

Application software training is a viable example of how establishing trust in the workplace yields positive results. Whether a C-level, middle manager or front-line employee, training has largely shifted away from in-person instruction to a more modern, virtual (or hybrid) model. While the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic favorably tipped the implementation scale for learning lab environments, the progression toward virtual and hybrid training has been racing to the forefront of training and development programs since the turn of the millennium. Today, the productive partnership between learning and development (L&D), human resources (HR), information technology (IT) and operations depends on it.

Software Application Training Spotlight: Onboarding

Whether on site, remote or hybrid, the estimated cost of hiring and onboarding an employee costs an average of $4,000 and it takes roughly six months for a company to start seeing returns on a new-hire investment. Cloud-based training technologies that eliminate the cost to ship hardware, avoid complicated installations, and prevent the need to labor through lengthy instruction manuals, can help to reduce employee ramp-up time and ease the onboarding process.

Secure, scalable learning lab environments that are deployable with an internet browser connection and allow for full training functionality with a simple flip of a switch result in a better employee experience. From onboarding to role-based software application training to continuing education, the standardization and implementation of virtual learning labs yield real-world development experiences that can be tailored to any industry. Increased communication, collaboration and adoption are some of the benefits seen by employers and employees, helping to solidify trust throughout an organization.

How Mercer Accelerates Onboarding and Performance with Hands-on Learning Labs

Effective hiring and onboarding processes lower the cost of recruitment, increase the likelihood of retention and ensure the right people are paired with the roles in which they’ll be most productive. Mercer, part of the $20 billion professional services firm Marsh McLennan, understands the factors in that equation and its current virtual training initiatives for onboarding are now setting the bar for other enterprises.

Mercer’s roughly 25,000 employee base works to reshape investment outcomes for millions across 130 countries. The staff needs training on various software applications throughout their Mercer career. As it did for many businesses, COVID-19 altered how Mercer delivers L&D programs. Unlike most, its agile infrastructure enabled a quick pivot to make 152,000 training hours virtual (and yet hands on), to increase engagement and performance beyond pre-pandemic levels.

Before the shift to an online learning lab platform, Mercer used Zoom and Microsoft Teams as the main communication tools to execute virtual classrooms. However, both were limited in what they could provide compared to the benefits of a physical classroom. They weren’t meeting the needs of Mercer, its instructors or its learners.

For example:

• The L&D team saw an increase in the amount of time spent on desktop set-up, which frustrated everyone.
• Instructors had to stop an entire class just to help one learner if they were lost, rather than being able to address their needs and carry on with class so they didn’t lose time or attention.
• Training environments were not easily accessible (or accessible at all) due to technology and systems integration complications.
• Hands-on training wasn’t an option, which created a barrier between instructors and learners, and slowed adoption.

Ultimately, Zoom and Teams failed to provide an efficient and effective way to replicate the best parts of the physical, in-person classroom experience in a virtual environment. Mercer had to find a solution that would allow for engagement and performance that empowered learners to feel confident in the training they received. With a new 2022 recruitment class getting ready for onboarding, the L&D team knew the time was ripe for change.

Onboarding new hires at Mercer was, and still is, a global effort. That 2022 class of 700 needed immediate training during open enrollment on all business systems. Previously, Mercer found it took more than four weeks and an average of $854,000 to train employees during open enrollment; and if the system went down Mercer suffered a loss upwards of $210,000.

With that new onboarding class, Mercer’s innovative L&D team revamped training programs with goals to:

• Shrink the time and cost associated with high-quality, personalized training.
• Improve learner/instructor experience, engagement and performance by implementing a cloud-based, hands-on, virtual learning lab strategy.
• Simplify connectivity, increase feedback mechanisms and take as much platform responsibility off of IT’s plate as possible, and
• Create a successful model that could be applied across other Marsh McLennan companies.

Leveraging an interactive, hands-on software application training platform, Mercer simplified its learning experience for business-critical application training into an easy-to-setup and access virtual lab environment. Learners and instructors were provided with a login to a virtual desktop and instructional platform. The cloud-based set up also enabled facilitators to teach and observe learners in real-time, as well as take control of the environments if necessary, to further personalize support and knowledge transfer.

Cost, time and resources (especially IT’s) were saved; engagement and performance increased; communication and culture flourished; data and IP were secured; trust in skills development and career advancement were established.

For 2023, Mercer is already rolling out its cloud-based virtual learning labs strategy to other entities for skill building and beyond. In addition, the L&D team is working with internal operations and technology teams to incorporate Mercer’s enterprise systems to streamline processes and deliver invaluable training solutions that exceed every department’s needs.

Register for the next in-person Training Industry Conference & Expo (TICE) to hear Joe Schulz’s session, “Cloud-based Virtual Learning Labs Rebuild Employee Trust in Training: A Mercer Use Case.”