How to Create an Employee Training Program for Small Business

Hey everybody, this is Matt from ERG. Thanks for joining me today. Today we're going to talk about employee training. We've been getting a lot of questions from small business owners about how to create an efficient and effective employee training program for their small business. I think we've all been to that training that was effective for about 24 hours and then we went right back to our old habits a couple days later. We're going to give you the steps that you can take to make sure your team stays in it for the long haul because you've got clearly defined goals and measurables that you want to take away from the training and you want to execute on in the long term. So thanks so much for joining us. We're gonna go through these 5 steps of how to create a sticky training program. Thanks a lot. Step 1, you need to ask, what is the training need and what does success look like? You need to not only ask your team, your leadership, your managers, but you can also ask your clients or vendors outside the organization, where does my team struggle and what can I do to make them better? So without asking the right questions from a variety of people and identifying common themes, you'll never know what the real need is. And sometimes we often think that our team needs one set of training when in reality there's a much bigger sore spot that we can focus our time and energy on. So ask the right questions up front to make sure you maximize your time down the road. That's step 1: ask. Step 2 is to prepare. This is the most important step in the training process. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. You need to identify not only who's going to be involved in the training, but the method of training and what your goals are for the training. So make sure that you have clearly defined goals, whether that be to improve sales in the third quarter. If that means to drive up customer service, uh, customer service success by a certain percentage, make sure you have those goals and you have a specific way to measure them so that you can identify the impact of your training over time. So make sure that you prepare and you spend the time on the front end to lay out a clear plan of action of not only how the day or days of training are going to go, and/or the sequence of those events, but also how you're going to measure the impact down the road. That's step 2, prepare. Step 3 is to align. You want to make sure you have alignment from the employee level to the ownership level. Everybody understands what the training is for, what the expected outcome is, and they're all on the same page and engaged in it. So if you go and train an employee about a new process or a new way of doing things and their manager is not on the same page as them when they go back to doing their tasks every single day, then that training is going to fall flat on its face days or weeks down the road because they're not on the same page. So make sure that everybody in the organization from top to bottom understands the impact that this training is going to have and that they're on the same page going forward. Align your organization for success in your sticky training program. Step 4 is to execute. As with everything in business, it all boils down to execution. So on the days of the training, you need to not only make sure that you're allocating the proper time and resources so that your team cannot feel rushed and they can get through the training and be hands-on and engaged in learning throughout, but you also need to make sure that you've got the proper mechanisms in place to follow up on the training after the fact. If your team does not feel like they can be engaged and give it their all during the training process, then they're gonna be thinking about other things. So clear the table, make sure everybody has the time and energy dedicated towards the task at hand so you can get the results that you desire from your training program. Now, step 5, it's time to identify if this training has stuck. Now, you can do this in a variety of ways. Such as testing people the minute that the training is over to see if the information that they had, that they consumed throughout the training was learned, testing them again 1 to 2 weeks later to see if they maintain that information that they learned throughout the training. And then also by measuring the performance through the goals that we've set out. Now, one key element that people often forget about is to measure the satisfaction of your team of the training. People learn in different ways. Some learn through a visual method, some learn audio, some learn kinesthetic, they have to be hands-on. So make sure that you're hitting on all cylinders with your training and you're not losing any of those 3 types of learners throughout the period. Make sure you're measuring and you've got— you've already established those goals early on of what you hope to get out of it. So make sure you're sticking to it 30, 60, 90 days after your training's over so that you can see the success you hope for. Investing in your people is the best way for your small business to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. You know that your large competitors are investing in their team and they and they've got the budget and resources to do it. So you need to make sure that you allocate any funds and time that you have available to making the most of your human capital. Thanks so much for joining us today. Once again, my name is Matt Vaadi with ERG. If you'd like to learn more about us and how we help small businesses to maintain compliance, remove the administrative burden associated with HR, and get more out of their people, you can check us out at ergpayroll.com. Thanks again for joining us.