Do You Have a Training Issue in your Business?

In many small businesses training takes a backseat to day-to-day functions. In some ways, it makes sense, there’s a lot to be accomplished and resources are limited. Therefore, training is easy to push to the bottom of your to-do list.

However, a lack of training can cause frustrations and unneeded problems for your business. Many businesses don’t even realize they have a training issue until its too late.

How can you tell?

You know you have a training issue if:

• It takes months to train a new employee to be self-sufficient

• You find yourself handling tasks that you shouldn’t because it will be faster

• You see a pattern of mistakes coming from the same position in your business

• You find yourself reluctant to delegate work because you’re not sure if it will be done right

• Your own work is interrupted multiple times a day to answer questions

• Clients ask for you because they don’t want to work with your team

There are other warning signs, but these are common ones that point to the fact that your team isn’t trained for success. The good news is that there are quick and easy changes you can implement in your business today.

In many businesses training is seen as a one-time event. It happens in the moment as situations occur. The problem with this is that training takes too much of your time. And when you wait for an event to happen, training is dependent on something that you can’t control. This means that training gets delayed and sometimes forgotten about.

Follow these three tips to make training more scalable:

• Implement a Training Checklist for Each Position. When a new person starts there should be a roadmap of what they need to learn. A checklist that the employee and their manager both rely on is a great way to ensure that nothing gets forgotten or delayed too long. If you didn’t use a checklist when a current employee started, it’s not too late to implement this technique. Take a look at their job description and create a checklist of what they should know how to do. Use that checklist to evaluate what they can do on their own right now. That will help you create a training plan regardless of how long the person has been a member of your team.

• Document! As you train, ask the person you are training to take notes. Let them know that part of their training will be to write a step-by-step accounting of how to do the work you are teaching them. This is a good way to test their knowledge of what they have learned. In addition, the next time they have questions their first place to look is their notes. This takes the pressure off you to answer every question that they have. This document can then be updated to ensure that they have the right steps (or a system) for doing their work.

• Use Case Studies. Case studies are great ways to quickly train employees because they are repeatable. You don’t have to start from scratch each training session. Case studies can be created by recording calls or previous training sessions. If you are training a process such as how to use software, you can easily capture a screen shot of a particular issue when it happens. Then you don’t have to wait for that event to happen to train new employees because you have it captured. These case studies don’t have to be professionally done. In today’s world it’s easy to record using your cell phone or a screen share program. The important aspect is that you capture the situation and the training steps.