How Excel & Flourish Trains In A Hybrid Work Environment

Hi everyone, it's Jennifer Buchholz with Excel & Flourish. I'd like to take a moment to talk to you about how we prefer to train in a hybrid work environment because we're doing hands-on technical training.

Rarely am I just doing a demonstration. Instead, I have files where people are participating, asking questions, and doing things along with me. I've been doing it that way for years! But over the last year, we've learned some additional ways to make it more effective and make the training stick. 

Now, the training itself is a great thing. We can spend an hour- two hours- digging into the content and even better when I can use sample files from the organization where I'm training. But when we have a hybrid work environment where we have some people in person- and I'm in the room with them- and we have some people online, I have a couple things that make it a win for everybody. 

First of all, I love to have multiple screens. I have all of my participants that are online (and willing to be on video) up on screen, and then I have the rest of the folks in the room. This way, I am always watching to make sure that there is understanding. I'm monitoring Chat so that I can see if there are any questions coming in from online, and I ask people in the room if they have any questions. 

So, that's what we do when training in a hybrid work environment. I do multiple steps to make sure the people are understanding both in person and online. What also makes what we do different is that we have added two separate work sessions: one with just our online trainees, and another for our in-person trainees.

This means, we have a separate time after the training for the people online to ask me questions. If they're only going to be virtual, I want to dig in with them and have an Ask Me Anything just for my virtual participants. And then we do the same thing but live and in person for my folks who are live and in person. That way I can go around check on their computers, be really hands-on, and dig into what their questions are. 

Without adding that additional Ask Me Anything type of component, we can't guarantee that the training is translated to what they need to do every day in their jobs and that's part of my mission; not just train so they learn something but train so they can do their jobs better. 

I hope this has been a helpful perspective on how we can do training in a hybrid work environment! For any other questions on training, certifications, and availability, please don’t hesitate to connect with us!