by Greg Casale, CEO, Starbak
With budgeting issues affecting organizations across all industry sectors, many entities are scrambling to maintain the quality of employee training initiatives. While some programs can be reduced or even cut completely, others like health care training and education are mandated by law.
If you have a training program in place, you will know that costs can be significant. These costs can be direct such as transportation, meals and accommodations, or indirect such as time away from the job. One technology that is gaining in popularity and enabling organizations to do more with less in these financially difficult times is the deployment of video portals as a means of delivering on-demand training in a way that can be “self service” for employees and other professionals.
A video portal enables organizations and communities to securely share video content such as training videos, live seminars, or events. By deploying a customizable video portal, organizations can take advantage of their high bandwidth corporate Local Area Networks (LAN) for delivering video, while preserving scarce bandwidth over the Wide Area Network (WAN). This technology allows organizations to:
- Provide video-based training programs to employees designed to reduce personal and legal liabilities (sexual harassment, ethics, diversity, workplace violence, etc.)
- Offer continuing education to employees for professional accreditation, while reducing travel and time out of the office
- Prescribe a video-based performance improvement curriculum to correct deficient behavior or provide professional development (leadership, supervisory skills, conflict management, etc.)
- Deliver health and wellness education to improve overall employee health, including stress management, weight management, heart disease, diabetes, etc.
- Offer self-guided new employee orientation
- Provide video-based training to factory workers on procedures, processes, safety, OSHA, materials handling, etc.
With rapidly evolving techniques, processes, and regulations, organizations in the health care industry need to provide professionals in the field with a streamlined method for continuing education. By using a video portal, employees can instantly access a rich library of discipline-specific training, departmental videos, and agency information.
Many progressive health care training organizations are embracing video portals as a way to maintain the quality of training programs while reducing costs. One such organization is Alabama Department of Rehabilitation Services (ADRS), which used a state grant to deploy enterprise video portals and integrated networks from Starbak, a provider of video communications solutions located in Burlington, MA.
With four major programs scattered across the state–Alabama's Early Intervention System (AEIS); Children's Rehabilitation Service (CRS); Vocational Rehabilitation Service (VRS); and State of Alabama Independent Living/Homebound Service (SAIL)–it was a significant challenge for all ADRS professionals to maintain continued education in their specific field or discipline. Since the video portal deployment, 800 geographically dispersed rehabilitation professionals throughout the state’s 67 counties now have on-demand access to targeted and timely skills training videos. ADRS has also leveraged the video capabilities of its Starbak portal to deliver frequent, video-based public announcements and executive addresses to its employee base.
Using the video portal, ADRS has been able to provide timely and cost-effective employee training while enabling employees to use their time more efficiently. For example, hundreds of employees no longer have to travel to the ADRS headquarters in Montgomery to attend half- or full-day training sessions. In addition, the significant reduction in inter-office travel expenses–and time spent away from the office–has enabled the department to direct savings toward improved health care delivery efforts.
By using a distributed content delivery network consisting of Starbak Delivery Nodes, local streaming servers that reside on its private network, the ADRS portal enables video files and streams to be served locally to each viewer over high-bandwidth corporate LANs. This preserves scarce and valuable WAN bandwidth for other online activities. Since ADRS runs a T1 line to most of its offices, it would become saturated very quickly if a large number of its 800 employees chose to access content from their video library or view a public announcement at the same time. By using a distributed content delivery network to delivery video over high bandwidth LANs, viewers get a high-quality, TV-like viewing experience while minimizing buffering or choppy video.
Organizations like ADRS that have embraced and deployed innovative video technology have been able to expedite and simplify employee training. By significantly reducing the time spent traveling to training classes, these organizations have been able to reduce costs and re-allocate staff resources to improving service delivery.
Greg Casale is CEO of Starbak, a provider of enterprise video portals and integrated networks for the education, corporate, health care, and government markets. He can be reached at gcasale@starbak.com.
