A typical employee training program has four parts: Education, Application, Certification, and Continuation. Let’s dive into each of the four.
Create and distribute all of the educational tools that you need to train your employees. Items may include:
Application is ultimately hands on practice. During this phase, the employee should have already seen a visual of what the job should look like and follow the procedures as they’ve already seen them done. They don’t need to reinvent the wheel – just execute properly.
Be patient during this stage, as a new employee will never be as fast, accurate or as skilled as the trainer. Allow them time to continue to improve their knowledge, skills and abilities.
A structured certification process for completion creates accountability for the trainers. Without an official completion or certificate, you create inconsistency across your team members. Certification creates the need for follow-up by leadership and creates involvement, as well as creating an end goal for initial onboarding.
Achieving a training certification should be a big deal for your employees! Set up ways to recognize their achievements in either a display board, announcement to the team, or other public recognition.
Finally, remember that training doesn’t stop with week one of employment; it’s not a “once-per-job” thing. Training is an ongoing process. Every shift leader or trainer should be teaching, showing, and inspiring at all times. Because ultimately, training is about creating a learning culture. Treat it like farming or gardening. If you prepare the ground, fertilize, water, water, water, prune, water…and stick with it – you get plentiful results.
There are a variety of challenges when it comes to training and we aren’t trying to ignore them. We know training expenses are often the LAST item budgeted and the FIRST to get cut. During training, productivity is decreased since the trainer has dual responsibilities. And oftentimes new employees, other employees, trainers or customers get frustrated or impatient when dealing with a training situation.
All of these factors may scare you a little bit – but if you’re afraid to train them, what then? A classic corporate dilemma often portrayed by HR departments describes two executives talking where one asks the other, “What if we train them and they leave?” and the other responds, “What if we don’t….and they stay?”
Investing in your employees may be time consuming and involve oversight and organization, but ultimately a well-trained employee is more valuable to you than a semi-trained employee. As Richard Branson said, “Train people well enough so that they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”