Borders no barrier to remote training delivery

More than 180 staff from the international offices of engineering practice schlaich bergermann partner benefitted from a series of online workshops led by GIRI Training & Consultancy last week as part of the company's first online conference. 

Engineers and administration staff from the company's bases as far afield as Paris, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, New York, Berlin and company headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany collaborated with their colleagues in workshops that involved planning and communicating instructions for simple Lego creations. The purpose of these exercises, led by GTC director Nick Francis, was to enable participants to understand how behaviours impact on design, the potential pitfalls of poor planning and communication, and when and why they should ‘press pause to eliminate error’. 

Over the two-day conference, alongside a wide range of other exercises, the GTC team remotely delivered four workshops each 90 minutes long, and a series of interactive coffee break activities. The first workshop was based on the Lego planning exercises used in GIRI’s Supervisor & Manager (Part 2) course, and the second was based on the Lego design exercise developed for GIRI’s Interfaces (Part 2) course. Both workshops were delivered twice during the conference.

Participants were asked to comment on what lessons they could take away from the workshops to apply to their day-to-day work. ‘Rushing can lead to major errors’; ‘Let everybody get familiar with the task first’; ‘Define the means of communication in the beginning’ and ‘Remember that the people that build the project might have no idea, make it as easy as possible for others to understand’ were just some of the many positive comments. 

Nick Francis said: “I’m really delighted with how the exercises went, and have certainly learned a lot about running the workshops remotely, integrating video-conferencing, the Mural whiteboard software, and the Lego exercises together successfully.”

GIRI Training & Consultancy now offers all its industry-leading courses as remote learning. The integrated suite of training has courses specifically tailored to the needs of the leaders of construction projects, people who manage design and construction interfaces, and front-line site supervisors and managers.

For more information about GIRI Training visit https://getitright.uk.com/courses 

For more information about SBP visit https://www.sbp.de/en/