Five Ways to Make the Most of Your Employees’ Experience
(Photo credit: Lower Columbia College)
One of the most important and hard-to-quantify assets that a company amasses as it runs is the expertise and experience of its staff. Nowhere is this value more highly valued than when it is absent. The explicit and hidden costs of getting new employees up to speed when hiring are astronomical.
In an environment where the workers are familiar with the flow of a business day, and have practice performing their jobs, a new and untrained employee is disastrously less productive, and, worse, can reduce the productivity of those around them. A well-oiled machine cannot tolerate a sticky cog. Because of this, rapidly training new employees is one of the most important tasks to plan when you’re hiring. Here are five simple steps to streamline the process, and get new hires on their feet as fast as possible.
1. Go Beyond “Training Day”
A day to get new employees on their feet is great – it helps to eliminate small misunderstandings and to create a welcoming environment. However, there are real, practical limits to the amount of information that can be conveyed in a few hours’ lecture/tour with a break for lunch in the middle. It is vital to maintain a continued educational presence in the working lives of new hires until such time as they are working smoothly with the rest of the team.
2. Employ Peer Mentoring
The most effective way to learn a foreign language is immersion. The same principle applies to the rigors of a job. Have a new hire shadow another employee for a week, and take detailed notes on their behavior. This is less disruptive, in the end, than an employee trying to perform a job they don’t know how to do, and gives them a better intuitive sense of how the job is properly done. If they have questions, encourage them to take them to their peers (and make sure their peers are rewarded for helping them). This allows you to leverage the natural flow of workplace communication to help train new hires. It also lets you get a sense, from your most effective employees, of how a new worker is fitting in.
3. Avoid Dry, Boring Training Manuals
Almost every corporation has a ‘new employee handbook’ floating around somewhere. Generally, they’re long, tedious, condescending, and, worse, often hard to apply to the day-to-day flow of workplace life. A manual of standards, procedures, and best-practices is invaluable in cases of doubt, but it’s not at all the kind of material that you want to use for training. Consider using a training management solution to create multi-media training programs. By having your best employees create this material once, you can re-use it to train many generations of new hires without having to waste employee time on every minor point of confusion. Better still, the training material can often be traded or sold, allowing you to explicitly monetize this valuable corporate asset.
4. Stop Mistakes Before They Happen
It’s easy to relax when an employee appears to be settling in and not worry about training anymore. However, if the employee still has serious misunderstandings about their job, this can be dangerous. Have a peer check in on them to answer questions and briefly review their work for at least a few months. Education is a continuing process.
5. Remember: Training Never Stops
A workforce that isn’t learning is a workforce that’s falling behind the competition. Encourage your employees to keep up with the state of the art in the industry, and bring you insights. What are your competitors doing? Are the best-practices shifting? What can you be doing better than you are now? If you come across something that looks valuable, consider bringing in experts to help prepare new training materials for your staff. In the modern world, it is vital to always be learning. Those who cannot adapt to changing market conditions do not survive.
Sameer Bhatia is the founder of ProProfs.com, a provider of online LMS software.
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Category: Business
