Employee Training
As we grow our business, the hardest thing to do is hiring. We do our very best to vet people before bringing them on board, and when they fail, we oftentimes blame them for not doing what we intended for them to do.
Employee training helps you bring your new hires onboard faster and more efficient every time.
Keys to Great Employee Training Content
The painful thing to remember here is that you are paying your new hires to learn, so creating a training program that is fast is key to success. You brought them on to fill a need you are feeling in your business and you need them to help as soon as possible.
While your employees are learning how to work in your business, your workload doubles, and sometimes triples because you’re investing your time in your employee. Great employee training programs are efficient, allowing you to run your business as they learn.
Employee training has to be effective, which means that when they’re done with their allotted training time, they have the tools to actually succeed. If they have a bunch of questions, or the same questions, it’s sign that the training may need tweaking.
Samples and Examples Of Client Training
In-house training programs are proprietary, so visuals and demonstrations will not be available unless I’ve received authorization to use them on my site.
Real indie Author
Right before COVID hit, I opened a author services boutique, catering to indie authors. Within months, I had grown the operation past the point I could serve my authors, so I developed a training program to help them outline books strategically.
History
At the time, writing outlines for other authors was a foreign idea. Ghostwriting was one thing, but coming up with the idea, the outline, the character arcs, and the plot elements was new. So, when I brought on other outliners, it should have been no surprise that we were getting mixed results.
Inception
After receiving customer complaints, I first gave each of my outliners my book outline templates. However, that seemed to make the situation worse. So, I documented the issues my outliners and my authors had with the process, and created a course to walk them through it.
System
The Teachable course was available on-line.
It had four main modules with three submodules.
Each module had a video, a transcript for those who couldn’t do video, work sheets, and supplementary written instructions that helped move the process along.
Ludvik Electric
Too often, when employees are hired, their additional or “secret” skills are discovered. This leads to new work being given to them in an effort for the business to survive.
History
That’s what happened at Ludvik Electric, a major electrical contractor serving the Denver Metro area of Colorado. I was brought in as a project coordinator, and I immediately started rearranging processes to make them more efficient.
Inception
They gave me the opportunity to develop the training materials to use when bringing on new project coordinators, either from the field or from administrative roles. It was challenging a lot of fun, and I learned a lot about how to properly structure training for max effectiveness.
System
This was in the early 2000s, so the training manual I created was a tabbed binder with outlines, SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), and detailed step-by-step processes.
Supplementary Systems
Additionally, I finetuned the tools (namely Excel spreadsheets) that we all used to ensure everyone obtained the same results.