"What essential elements have you used to train quality staff to work for your companies?"

July 14 2009 - Syracuse Post Standard

Tracy:
I believe it’s essential for companies to have an excellent training system in place to help new employees succeed immediately. You can hire the most qualified person for the job but if you don’t educate them on your business philosophy, employee standards and expectations, and job responsibilities from the start you are doing both parties a disservice.
We always begin by giving our employees personalized binders with detailed information about our corporate history, policies, goals and plans for the year to give them a clear perspective of the business. Their job description and responsibilities are part of the binder along with other employee documents. They can reference this binder whenever they need to.
Weekly one-on-one meetings are hosted the first three months of employment which allows for training on specific responsibilities, addresses questions, and keeps everyone on track with expectations. By the end of the first quarter, employees are usually well trained on their overall responsibilities and are making positive contributions to the company.

Theresa:
We begin by teaching new staff the history of the business; what our philosophy is and who our customers are. They spend time familiarizing themselves with our staff at each one of our sites and then go out into the community to see how we actually work with our customers.
Once they begin working in the office, we utilize our written policies and procedures for each position. Having these documented is multipurpose; it gives new staff a clear definition of their responsibilities and gives our customers consistency when they utilize our services.
We also require each employee to receive continuing education throughout the calendar year. This may mean bringing in an outside consultant or sending them to a workshop or training specific to their job.
Finally, as a follow up, periodic evaluations are scheduled so that the possible need for additional training can be evaluated and/or implemented.

Julie:
It can be tricky to figure out how to train new staff in a business that’s based on the owner’s talent and/or creativity; I used to really struggle with this. But, even a creative business can be broken down into standardized steps. We started by moving from custom designs only to a catalog of standard offerings. Our customers liked it better and it was much easier to train our employees.
We begin by showing them how to make the standards. To ensure consistency, we created a binder with a spreadsheet for every gift listing all the components along with a photograph. We also work to make everything as “goof proof” as possible. If you’re doing any volume, your end product can’t be so difficult that no one else can replicate it. Employees master the simple designs first before we move them on to more complex and custom things, and we let everyone know up front that we will be critiquing their work before it goes out the door.