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Training on the Cheap!
January 18, 2007
If you have a small business, training your employees can be extremely costly and a challenge. Though costly, employee development is closely linked to the growth of a company. This is especially true for small businesses, in which each employee plays a vital role in the success of the company. More knowledgeable, skilled, and capable employees directly influence your company’s ability to satisfy customers, resolve problems and crises, and adapt to changing market conditions.
Most business owners regard employee training the same way many of us regard going to the gym – it’s a great idea, and it’s essential to our well-being, but who has the time for it? Here are cost effective and easy ways to train new staff:
- List of Duties. Before your new employee's first day on the job (or better, before you even hire that person), create a detailed list of his or her duties. Include what you expect of that person, how he or she is to go about the job, how you will evaluate performance, and so on, so you can tell the employee those parameters when he or she starts.
- Hold an on-site training session every 2 weeks for 20 minutes. Have your manager or a senior staff member run the training session. This reduces your costs of bringing outside specialists to train your new-bee and you don’t have to pay your new hire more money to come on their day off or pay for them to go to a seminar.
- Having weekly sales and/or training meetings for the entire staff. I know you’re busy so assign a different staff member a week to run the meeting. Make it known that the meetings will be focused on sales techniques and product knowledge. Maybe your staff is lacking on specific brands product knowledge. Give that particular sales associate running the meeting books to read, or URL's to checkout. Let them create their own ideas and/or activities that will help to develop their skills and keep your sales meetings entertaining.
- Assign a mentor. For their first two months at the company, designate buddies who are close to their level--definitely not the people they report to. A buddy might, for instance, give a tidbit regarding what a manager dislikes or looks for. Their buddy might offer a mistake they made and how to correct it. That's not training per se, but your managers might overwhelm them with many details. Assigning your new-bee a buddy at their level might help to ease them into this new position.
- Urge employee only meetings. By encouraging employees to form committees to address issues that concern and interest them, you have, in effect, created another method of continuing employee education and development. Together your employees will learn from each other. If you want to know in advance, what’s going to be covered; have your manager give you a memo on what the meeting will cover or have your employees site something they learned a day after the meeting.
The Bottom Line: The biggest mistake many entrepreneurs make is throwing everything at the new employee at once and expecting that person to get up to speed immediately. In addition, most employees find learning new skills and taking on new challenges extremely rewarding. Satisfied employees have a more positive attitude, work harder, and stay with your company longer than workers who aren't given opportunities to grow…plus you don’t have to break the bank to effectively train your new-bee.
Posted by Shanu Singh Guliani on January 18, 2007 | Comments (0)
