The Benefits of Televised Health Webinars in the Workplace

When it comes to getting your point across to a large group of people all at the same time, the best medium is often a webinar. In this article we explore what a webinar is and why it is a great medium to address any number of issues, from new business directives, to employee wellness.

A webinar is typically an online meeting but it differs in that it is not a conference or discussion and there is usually only one speaker, heard by the audience, who are not usually able to participate by speaking. There is not usually a restriction to the number of people who can attend a webinar. All you need is a connection to the internet and you can attend from anywhere in the world to hear a speaker speak on a particular subject. Registration by email usually takes place in advance of the talk and content can come from many different sauces: documents, presentations, spreadsheets, videos, etc. Participation by the audience is usually via typed questions using software set up for the purpose.

In the event you or your company wanted to communicate a very important message to a large number of employees, colleagues, or, across many departments stretched across the globe, this would be the ideal platform. The advantages of using a webinar over email or other forms of communication are:

1. It is easy and convenient to set up.
2. No travel (including long-distance) is required to reach any number of audience members situated anywhere in the world.
3. No special equipment is required: just a computer and internet connection.
4. No long notice periods are needed since the webinar can be set up pretty quickly before it happens.
5. Webinars do not necessarily require on-site technical support.
6. After the first orientation session, it becomes easy to set up and host.
7. It is fairly easy to pass over hosting of the webinar to other hosts or even to learners.
8. With the right software, all invitations, registration and automatically generated reminders are taken care of as part of a full service.
9. With certain webinar hosting software companies, practice sessions are part of the service.
10. Webinars can be recorded to be watched on-demand by anyone who is unable to attend.

Like with most things though, there are also disadvantages. Here are a few to look out for:

1. Connection speed to the internet will need to be fairly adequate to avoid lagging or distortion.
2. In most cases, the audio set is usually limited to the audience hearing the instructor even though two-way voice interactivity can be possible.
3. There is no body language communication.
4. Not all materials will display on all computers accurately.

That said, it’s a great tool to get across those very important occupation health and employee wellness messages so look into using it the next time you need to reach a large audience that’s geographically spread out.