Now (could be) the Time for Employee Training

How small businesses thrive by investing in employee training.

The Great Challenge for Small Businesses

Suppose you own a business or are one of the primary decision-makers within your organization.  You are working tirelessly to keep the business running daily, and on top of that, you’re working with vendors, managing cash flow, selling, marketing, and trying to do right by your team by paying them on time.  Every day, week, month, and year, you encounter many challenges, but for the context of this article, the focus will be on one of the biggest hurdles.  This is the paradoxical intersection of earning today vs investing in tomorrow.  What do I mean by this?  Simply, you know there is a delicate balance that needs to be struck between earning and bringing in cash now and investing in new processes and training for the future.

The paradox of this conundrum presents itself in ways you may not notice right away; if you never create processes or train your team, you’ll be stuck in a doom loop, just trying to keep the doors open one more day.  Conversely, if you only build for the future and completely forget about today/tomorrow, there’s no guarantee your doors will even be open when your grand plans come to fruition!

For many, investing in training or their employees can feel like a pipe dream or, at the very least, something they want to do, but push it off to the metaphorical “tomorrow.”  This is usually the most significant barrier to acting and striking while the iron is hot.  A quick reframe will show you just how valuable it is to set the foundation early on.  Small and mid-sized companies have the advantage of being agile.  While budgets and resources can be tight, you can enact and build new processes within days or weeks.  You can make training initiatives to ensure you “win” more sales and create a better workforce.  

One thing I always tell my clients is:

 Training = $$$ & Growth!

You can have great marketing, but your leads will go to waste without a finely tuned sales team.  Your service can be top-notch but if you aren’t in compliance with state or government regulations, you’ll encounter financial setbacks.  The list goes on and on.

Every business is unique and presents various challenges.  That’s the beautiful thing about being a learning and development designer.  I get to see all these roadblocks and figure out how to get around or over them with highly talented people within the organization.  In this article, we will focus on how you can start investing in your team and your future now, all while you’re still earning for today.  Also, stick around until the end, and you’ll receive our free performance improvement template to use right away.  This tool has helped me countless times as a manager and now as a learning design practitioner.  

So, where do we begin?  What the heck do you start training your employees on?  These are great questions.  Let’s dive a little deeper. 

Types of Employee Training

Training your employees sounds excellent, right? Some businesses like the idea and want to jump headfirst into the learning pool. While we love to see this, before you perform your award-winning Olympic dive into the waters, we encourage you to focus on a particular area of your company or a specific business goal you’d like to accomplish. That way, you can maximize resources to ensure the best outcomes. ROI (and measuring it) for training should be one of the main factors when deciding on your employee training program.  

Some questions you may want to ask yourself while deciding what training is needed are:

• What areas can my employees do their jobs more effectively to maximize productivity?

• What new skills can they develop to solve technical problems while helping build new career paths?

• Can I help them Improve institutional or industry knowledge to create better products or to serve our customers better?

• Can they enhance their interpersonal and leadership skills to cultivate future leaders?

• Are we successfully meeting our regulatory and compliance standards?

Once you feel like one (or more) of these resonate with your current needs, it’s time to hone in on the type of training you’ll need to provide.  Here are some of the top-level areas for employee training:

Depending on your current needs, you may require several different types of training in one learning experience. This is where a learning consultant can be a huge help. Having a third party objectively conduct a needs analysis will likely ensure your investment doesn’t go to waste.  More on this later.

Let’s say you’ve asked yourself the guiding questions. Now, you’ve referred to the list of training types, and you feel confident you know what direction to take.  The next question arises: How do you even begin implementing a staff training program?

Clever Ways to Implement Employee Training and Development

You’ve decided who within your organization needs training and what you will train them on.  After reviewing your budget and the schedule for the next quarter, you feel like now’s the time to develop a training program.  You sit down and start planning things out.  You do a little research into online tools, courses, software, etc.  You realize quickly that there is a lot, and I mean a lot of information.  Before you hit the panic button and go for a walk, let’s forget all that for a second and focus on what you can do right now to initiate a culture of learning at your company.

Cross-Training

Cross-training your team is vital for small and mid-sized businesses.  In sports, you hear the phrase “next person up,” which translates to, when someone goes down with an injury, the next person jumps in to fill their position.  This is a must for your team as well.  Start by having each department create a how-to list of their role, and once you’ve reviewed it, have them mentor or teach others how to execute their most vital tasks.  While there is no replacement for THE person you hired for the specific job, you can mitigate potential disasters by having your team shoulder some responsibility in a worst-case scenario.

Mentorship

Mentorship programs have withstood the test of time and are something we are big believers in.  A successful mentorship program has your best-performing employees (in the specific area you want to focus on for training). It has them mentor other people on your team throughout the skill-building process.  

It’s essential to ensure the mentor has a specific goal or set of KPIs to work towards in this type of training. You don’t want a mentor/mentee program to last too long and drain resources. Clearly defined goals and competencies will help the mentor, the mentee, and the business stay on track.

Develop Job-Aids

What in the world is a job-aid?  Great question.  A job-aid is an at-a-glance resource to remind someone of the steps involved in a process or the key things to remember when conducting a call or interacting with a customer. 

If you have a graphic designer or someone who likes to mess around with graphics in their free time, enlist them to build a job aid.  All you have to do is briefly list the steps you want accomplished and then create an easy-to-read one-pager with them.  You can do this easily by using a tool like Canva.  They have a free version where you can access some excellent templates.  The goal is to ensure that when your team needs access to the most critical information, they have it at their fingertips.

Rethink How You Conduct Team Meetings

Meetings, whether you cringe at the mere sight/sound of the word or welcome them with open arms, there are some strategic ways to maximize this time together.  One way to do this is to set aside time exclusively for a learning meeting.  Depending on what type of training you’ve selected, have someone on your team prepare a short (15 minutes or so) presentation on how they succeeded at the training topic, what steps they took to achieve success, and what challenges they faced along the way.  Then, allow for a Q&A with the rest of the team.  

These bite-sized lessons can go a long way and are used in the learning and development field.  Learning from peers and hearing real-world applications can be very effective when adopting new skills.

One tip to keep in mind is to be sure to sit back and listen. Listen to how your team interacts and the steps they took to succeed. For many people, the initial reflex is jumping in with their expertise or ideas. While this can be valuable, it can often impede the learning process. This is a perfect opportunity to show (and not tell) your team that you trust and believe in them while they learn from each other.  

I’ll discuss this a little more in the next section, but for now, remember always to align your training with your business goals.  These strategies are helpful, but if you aren’t in line with the overall goal, it will be a waste of time and resources, and we don’t want that!

Internal vs Outside Learning Support

A lot of CEOs and upper management of small to mid-sized companies are the type to want to get things done on their own.  This is an excellent quality and often leads to a lot of success.  The key is to know how to balance that with knowing when to ask for help.  Some people are good at this, but others could be better.  When it comes to investing in employee training, this can be a factor, but realistically, it also has a lot to do with budget and resources.  Before deciding whether to build a training solution in-house or to spend the money to hire a learning and development service, let’s look at a few pros and cons of both.

Internal Training

Pros: Creating training internally means you can move quickly.  You can develop and launch a training solution within days or weeks.  You can also be highly agile using your resources, software, materials, etc.  Also, you know you and your business better than anyone (or one would hope).  This means you can create a training experience on the exact topics you want.

Cons: Creating a training experience is a unique challenge.  While you can create training on any topic you want, it may differ from your staff's needs.  There are gaps that everyone misses, and you may be at risk of creating a learning experience that misses some key skills or leaves out some growth opportunities.  Expertise may also be lacking.  Did you know that there are fundamentally sound ways that adults receive and retain information?  Without implementing some of these techniques, your team may not retain the information needed over a sustained period of time.  This also includes a lack of knowledge regarding utilizing specific tools like online course software, visual aids, etc.  Lastly, an invisible barrier between the boss/manager and team dynamics will always exist.  Even in companies that are like a family, sometimes learning from the person you are with day in and day out may not be the most effective path forward due to biases or past interactions.

Outside Learning Support

Pros: This is their job.  A former boss/mentor always said, “You don’t go to a general practitioner for heart surgery.”  This is 100% true.  A learning and development specialist will conduct a complete skills gap analysis and learning needs assessment to ensure this is the proper training for your team.  They’ll also include the correct adult learning theories to ensure your team retains and can use these newfound skills on the job.  Also, an L&D professional will have ways of tracking the training results to ensure a healthy ROI AND to inform future training experiences.

Cons: They can be costly.  Depending on the learning support you work with, it could cost a lot more than you’re willing to spend.  Learning consultants can vary in price and features, so it’s always important to set up calls with them to see what they’re all about.  Also, they may not know your team as well as you do.  Any good L&D specialist should have some tools to get to know your team so they can design an experience that fits them.  However, that is not always the case for some as they may provide a slightly amended “off the shelf” product or skip this step altogether.

As you can see, there are pros and cons to either direction.  I always encourage people to start the conversation with outside resources first.  Whether that’s us or someone else, getting an outside perspective is important as we can take all emotion out of it and focus on the challenges your team faces.  

Performance Improvement

I hope by this point; your brain is swirling with ideas as to what kind of employee training you’d like to implement, some ways you can start to do it, and whether or not you want to start striking up a few conversations with outside L&D services.  As promised, here is a free template to help you navigate the waters of performance improvement within your organization.  

This document is something I built a long time ago and have used countless times as a sales manager and learning & development practitioner.  This and other tools have helped me mentor and coach people with record-breaking sales goals, promotions into leadership roles, and more.  It keeps me and my colleague organized and gives us a set of goals and an overall framework for success.  Adhering to a process like this has shown my colleague that we are both invested in their success.  Click the link below to download the template.  Then, feel free to change the logo and color scheme to fit your organization.  If you end up using it, let me know how it works!  Hearing how people adopt these new tools and processes is always great.

Are you interested in learning more about how to win by investing in employee training?  If so, you likely have many ideas about how to support your team's growth and learning. However, it can be challenging when you need more resources or assistance. That's where we come in. Depending on your needs, we can guide you through the process or serve as an outsourced team member. Our goal is to help you establish effective learning experiences.

Click the link below to set up a quick chat.  Let’s build something together!