MBA1491 How Often Should You Offer Training To Your Team?

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business, but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with Intuit QuickBooks. QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts. So doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform.

Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Product perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster. And with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals.

Hey. Oh. Welcome to the 100 doll. Because your business is not going to build itself, that's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn how often should you offer training to your team. Whether you're a team of two or a team of 20 or 200, if your business is going to improve, the whole team has to improve. Now you're listening to this podcast. You're most likely a founder of a business and and you're learning, you're improving. But what about everybody else that you've hired? How often should you offer training? How often should you require training? And how can you offer training in a cost effective way to your whole team, regardless of their position in your company? That's what we get into in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. It's pretty obvious the more highly skilled your team members are, the better they're going to perform, the better your business is going to get results. On the surface, this is a very logical investment, but practically what exactly do you do? And of course how often should they be doing training? Well, let's start with that question. How often? Back in the day, when I was in education, when I was a teacher, one of my responsibilities as the head of the department was I had to organize what was called PD days. This is called professional development days. And we would do one each semester. So twice a year, it would be a full day of training for teachers. Now, I love this example because teachers are incredibly busy. They have so much to do. They have papers to grade, they have quizzes to come up with, they have classes to teach, all that kind of stuff, right? So the last thing they have time for is training, right? So you gotta carve out time in the schedule during the year in your organization. And that's what we did at the institution where there was no classes those days. You know, school was out for the students. And it was just dedicated to improving the level of quality of education we provide the students. And in those days, we would offer, you know, classroom management workshops, we would offer curriculum development workshops and even workshops on different softwares we use in education, and even workshops on how to be a mentor to students. Now, the reason why I'm giving this example is allowing time for your team to stop for a moment and reevaluate things and get better is a really good idea. But sometimes you just are so busy building our business and getting things done, we just don't make time for it. You might think twice a year is quite a long time. Two days out of the year is a big ask. So I ask you to do at least once a year. Okay, once a year. And then we'll talk about some other things you can do throughout the year to make training a little bit more accessible and more time efficient. So once a year, and we like to time this with our team retreat, we run a totally remote team. So once a year, we all come together in a location in, and we spend a week together. We work and we play, and we have fun and we have experiences, but we also do some training. And this allows your team to brush up on some skills. And some of these skills are not really directly related to their job, but they could just be general skills that can help them do a better job. Skills like problem solving or working as a team. And this could be in a form of a puzzle or a game, or even just a brainstorming session where any and all ideas are welcome to solve, you know, problems that we have in the business. So a team retreat is a prime time to do training with your team. And you can easily make Time for it, even just half a day at one of those days on the week of the team retreat. Now, now, even if you don't do a team retreat, you can do what some teams do is like a remote team retreat where basically they're meeting on a video call for, you know, three days, having fun, doing games, and it's all virtual, it's all from the comfort of their home and they just take some time off from the business and the work of the business, just like they do in a physical retreat, but they do it remotely and this is where you can do training as well. Now another thing you can do or make time for is maybe just a monthly one hour training. I try to do this with the customer service team at Webinar Ninja where from time to time I'll jump in their weekly meeting and give a quick training on a new feature we're releasing or a new way we want to be able to serve our customers and allows me to jump in and also answer questions that they have. We also have a policy at Webinar Ninja where if somebody raises their hand and says, hey, I'd love to learn more about this, I'd love to take a course online or buy a course that is available. If it relates to their duties, to their job, their responsibilities at our company, we do everything we can to support them for that training, whether it's SEO, whether it's marketing, whether it's software development, it could be going to a conference, things like that. So you want to be supportive and you might have a policy around it like saying one training a year they can kind of opt into or you can have a budget for it. This is all up to you. Some companies, they have a book budget so you can buy up to $100 in books every single year to help grow your expertise. Some companies, they actually run a book club amongst all the team members. So each month they'll choose a book that would help everybody, whether it's a leadership book, whether it's a management book, and allows everybody to kind of read the book together. And they will discuss it on a weekly meeting. Their biggest takeaways, what they loved about it. And it kind of motivates everybody on the team to keep reading and finish the book. Now there's a lot of resources for general training. Lynda.com is a great resource. We've used that in the past to offer to our team members any kind of training they like from different softwares, from different sales techniques. Lynda has a wealth of training. If you're looking to buy something a la carte. Udemy has tons of inexpensive courses in specific areas, so Udemy is a great place to look if you're trying to find training for yourself or others on your team. Also, keep your eyes peeled for online summits. Online summits are becoming huge these days. There's an online summit that we're participating in in April that's all about remote work. So if you have a remote team, get them to sign up for a summit. These summits, these online conferences are often free to attend live, and then they're about $100 or so to get the recordings. Online summits are a great way for you to kind of virtually attend a conference and brush up on your skills. Another great strategy is to invite somebody you know that can offer their area of expertise. Like if you know an SEO expert who you met at a conference, ask them. Do you mind jumping in on a call for 30 minutes and giving some pointers to my team? It would be really helpful. Most people just say yes and would do it in a heartbeat. 30 minutes is not a big ask, and that training can go a long way for your team. Another great way to offer training for your team is to get the team to offer training to others. There's experts right on your team right now that can offer their area of expertise that can offer their skills and their knowledge to the rest of the team. It allows you to empower them to share what they know. And if they've gone to a training or to a conference, make it a habit where they present even just for 30 minutes to the team. Hey, this is what I learned. These are my biggest takeaways. They can even write it up in your team collaboration software, whether it's Basecamp or Trello, and just give them notes. You can make out a requirement. Hey, if you go to a conference, come back and give us all the great nuggets that you learned. And that's not a big ask. And also you leverage one person going to a conference where everybody gets something from that conference, even if they didn't attend. Hey, Fidelity, how can I remember to invest every month?

With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs.

Huh, that sounds easier than I thought.

You got this?

Yeah, I do. Now where did I put my keys?

You will find them where you left them.

Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC member NYSE SIPC.

ClickUp just solved AI's biggest problem and it's saving 4 million teams from productivity loss every day. Unlike ChatGPT and other AI tools, ClickUp converges all your work into one platform so your AI super agents have full context to prioritize tasks, execute workflows, and draft documents instantly. Teams using ClickUp finish work 30% faster and cut meetings in half. Try ClickUp for free today and get 15% off AI upgrades at ClickUp.com podcast that's C-L-C-K-U P.com podcast to wrap up today's lesson.

Training is important, but you need to schedule it. You also need to prioritize it. You obviously want to get a lot of work done. You want to make sure your employees are working on what they should, what they were hired for to get things moving and to move the needle. But in order for people to feel fulfilled and be able to do a better job day in and day out and you can stay competitive in your field, training is important. So have at least one day a year where you do training and then periodically throughout the year, see if you can offer some online training to them. Use some of the tips and some of the strategies I share today. Whether it's getting somebody from the team to share their knowledge, getting a guest expert, or even you jumping in and sharing something that you've learned. Whether it's from a book or a conference, or even maybe just a video you saw online, every little thing counts. If you can throw it in periodically, it can really help the team and help how they feel about working in your company. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now. By hitting subscribe when the next episode's available, you'll get it right on your device with zero delay as soon as it's available. Also, by hitting subscribe, you get access to over 1400 episodes, 1400 business lessons. It's the only way to get access is absolutely free. Hit subscribe on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Stitch Radio, Apple Podcast, Overcast, Himalaya, Spotify, or on them all. Before you go, I want to leave you with this. Try to make your training days fun. I made sure that when I was back in education and I was in charge of organizing those PD days, you can make it a theme. You can make it a Hawaiian theme, you can make it an 80s retro theme. You can have fun with it. You don't have to make it boring. And it could be a nice change of pace from the daily nose down, working hard. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Free Art Friday. I'll see you then. Take care. Foreign.

Introducing Fidelity Trader plus, the next generation of advanced trading from Fidelity. Customize your tools and charts and access them seamlessly across desktop, web and mobile for faster trades anywhere you go, try the all new Fidelity Trader Plus. Learn more about our most powerful trading platform yet@fidelity.com trader+ investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC Member NYSE SIPC.