Ocean cargo terminals facing new training challenges

As noted in Logistics Management earlier this week, Navis recently surveyed over 165 of its customers to explore the impact made by COVID-19 on ocean cargo terminals. 

“These are unprecedented times for our customers and the industry as a whole,” said Andy Barrons, Chief Strategy Officer at Navis. 

At the same time, the company tells LM now that the shift to remote operations has yet to measured. 

“The business world is currently playing catch up, which is around the content of the training,” says Andy Clason, Vice President of Technical Services. “There is a skill set that needs development in general with remote work that is quite different than that in traditional onsite in-person work.”

Navis found that there is both an art and a science to holding effective virtual meetings. For example, virtual meetings typically need significantly more structure than their in-person counterparts. 

“It is more difficult than expected to allow for ad hoc agenda changes and breakout meetings, or pulling people in and out of meetings on the fly,” observes Clason. “More importantly, the ability to keep a large group engaged without losing their focused attention is much more of a challenge virtually than it is with in-person meetings and training.”

A big emphasis, therefore, has to be on engagement and interaction. For participants in online meetings to remain engaged, they must be called on not just to passively watch the meeting, but to participate in it actively, early and often, Clason maintains. 

“Setting up meeting agendas that encourage this requires significant advanced planning, and more importantly a skill set that many typically haven't developed,” he adds.  

In the absence of these tools and skills, we all tend to fall back to setting up our virtual meetings and training as if they were in person, with predictable results: disengaged students and participants and significantly less effectiveness overall.

Concludes Clason: 

There is, therefore, an opportunity to train businesses how to more effectively work online, and training courses that go beyond the obvious items (like how to set up and use webcams, for example) and emphasize instead the tips and tricks that students might not think of otherwise (for example, having a virtual “lunch” where everyone takes a break but nonetheless socializes online as an informal part of longer meetings).