It’s an undeniable fact that the way you train your employees will directly affect how well they’ll be able to perform a given task, especially when they’re new to the job. Furthermore, the resulting poor performance might be perceived by management as a fault of the employee, when in reality the training material and experience is insufficient to give the employee the preparation needed. In addition to affecting measurable performance, poor training and orientation can also reduce employee morale. With that said, here are three tips you can use to develop or improve your current employee training regimen:
1. Assessing Common Problems and Weaknesses
First and foremost, you need to be assessing and addressing the most common problems in your workforce. A meeting with managerial staff and key employees can reveal a lot about who is doing what wrong and why. Perhaps the best way to find out which tasks employees are having the most trouble with is to administer employee surveys periodically.
Most of the time, if you simply ask an employee which tasks they’re having problems with in person, they may shy away from revealing their own shortcomings due to the pressure of being faced with a supervisor. However, a professionally designed employee survey (i.e. – Insight Link surveys) can coax employees into confessing operational weaknesses in the form of useful feedback.
2. Walk Yourself Through the Job Process and Write Down Every Step
This is an excellent way to see the job from the perspective of an employee in order to develop the most comprehensive and detailed step-by-step training regimen possible. To use this method, simply perform all of the tasks the employee would within their position, writing down the name of the task, all of the steps involved, and even the sub-steps involved in each step.
Once you have the whole process mapped out, address each step individually during the course of training. By using a precise map instead of general principles and advice, you’ll have the comfort of knowing that employees have been given all they need to become knowledgeable about the job before even getting started.
3. Use Supervised Trial Periods to Test the Efficacy of the Training Regimen
After training the employees based on your assessment of their admitted weaknesses, feedback from employee surveys, and your own experience documenting the exact job process, the final step is to test the efficacy of your training regimen by having management staff supervise the new employees throughout an initial trial period.
Generally, most companies opt for an employee evaluation/trial period of about a week or two, in order to gauge how well the new employee is adapting to the position. Trial periods are preferable over simple monitoring stages because the stipulations dictate that the employee is subject to termination if they’re unable to perform up to par. Thus, this is good way to safeguard your company from having to keep a new hire that isn’t a good fit for the job despite your effort to provide perfect employee training material.