4 Things You’re Getting Wrong With Staff Training
Investing in your employees and helping them to improve is the best way to create a well functioning team. That’s why training is so important in any company. That doesn’t just mean training people when they first start working for you either. You need to be giving people regular training so they’re always performing as well as possible. Most business owners already know this but that doesn’t stop them from making some fundamental mistakes with their training program. Training can be quite expensive and your employees need to take time out of their day to attend so if you’re not getting anything out of it, you’re just wasting time and money. These are some of the mistakes that you could be making and how to avoid them.
Training Without A Focus
When you bring a new employee on board you need to give them general training in all areas of the business but that doesn’t work for existing employees. You’ll just be telling them things that they already know and it won’t improve their ability to do their job. The point of training existing employees is to deal with any weaknesses in the business. That means your first step should be identifying those weaknesses and then you build a training program that actually has a focus. If you go in without a real idea of what you want to achieve and the areas that you want to improve, you won’t get much out of your training.
Neglecting The Basics
Another big mistake that people make with training is assuming that employees know the basics and neglecting those things in training. Basic computer skills are a great example of this. Employers these days assume that, because everybody has Microsoft Office on their personal computer, that they know how to use it. It’s true that they probably know the general basics but things like Excel are far more useful if you know how to use some of the more advanced functions. That’s why it’s a good idea to get a company like Excel Dimensions into do some onsite training for your employees. Starting out with more basic things gives your employees a good foundation to build on in further training.
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Not Using Examples
If you sit your employees down in front of a presentation and just feed them information all day, they probably won’t take that much in. They might not know how it actually helps them to do their job better either. That’s why it’s important that you’re giving them examples. You need to give them some information and then show them a few examples of how they might use that information in their day to day work.
Not Getting Feedback
Even if you avoid the rest of these mistakes, your training program isn’t going to be perfect every time. That’s why it’s important that you get feedback from your staff after every training session. Print out a quick questionnaire for them to fill in at the end of the day and ask for any suggestions on how to make it better. Then you can constantly improve your training and get better results every time.
Avoid these simple mistakes with your employee training and you’ll get more meaningful results every time.
Image credit: Flickr.com
Hi, I'm Kelly O'Donnell.