Training your employees is crucial. You can only have your business running smoothly when your employees have all the knowledge, skills and training they need. This is the only way you have to ensure that they have the best competency to do their jobs. And this in turn frees you up to develop strategies to grow your business.

Why Training Matters

When many small business owners think about training for employees, they immediately think about quick workshops from time to time. Others need to have a major problem to consider training for employees. While training for employees is important, it should follow a plan that flows from your Strategic Plan.

Memorialize Your Training in a Manual

Most businesses tend to have the same routines and the same line productions for years. So training for employees, in this case, should be fairly easy. However as a business owner, you know that things are changing all the time. And you need to adapt to changes quickly in order to succeed. This is why you need to have a training manual that you should follow. However, your training manual shouldn’t be the same forever. Just like things change, training changes as well. You need to ensure that you update it at least on a quarterly basis.

 Benefits of Ongoing Training

One of the things that you need to understand about training for employees is that this is directly related to operations. Operations should be efficient within your business. This is true whether you provide services, resell products or manufacture them.

When you have a small business, it is important to have both managers and employees understand how your business works and how each one of the tasks performed on a daily basis impacts the overall business results.

With this in mind, you can easily understand that the training for employees that you will promote needs to be adapted to the operations. So, when operations change, the training for employees needs to change as well.

So, how can you implement the best training for employees in your small business?

How To Have The Best Training For Your Employees

Here are the steps that you should follow:

#1: Create A General Plan:

Before you even start writing a training manual for employees, you need to know what is important for them to learn, what skills they need most. When you skip this step, you may be simply wasting time and money. Begin with the Values, Vision and Mission of your business and include it in your training manual. Then decide upon each important process in your business: for example the customer service process, the employee intake process, etc.

You can approach your process documentation in one of two ways. You can assign a manager who is responsible for the process to handle this and then approve/revise the process. Or you can do it yourself, one process at a time.

Then write down the skills and knowledge that your employees need to ensure they are able to do all their tasks successfully. Then write down step by step, each action that needs to be performed to complete the task. Make sure that you order them in a logical way, starting with the simplest information and then moving to the more advanced training.

#2: Establish Regular Training For Employees:

Training for employees isn’t one thing that you complete and that you don’t need to do ever again. As we already mentioned above, it is important to be on top of what is changing and keep adapting the training for employees at the same time. Besides, when you establish regular training sessions, it will be easier for your employees to be on top of what they are learning and they can start executing at the same time.

#3: Use Employees As Trainers:

When most business owners consider training their employees, they either assume they will be the ones leading the training or they will hire someone external to the company. However, there are many occasions where the business owner doesn’t have enough knowledge to train employees. Regarding hiring someone external to the company, while they can have great skills and good knowledge, there is no one who knows better your business than the people who work there. So, why not have employees as trainers?

Use Highly-Skilled and Good Communicators

While not all employees can be used as trainers, the truth is that you can use the ones who are highly-skilled and good communicators. They can be your managers or the employees you know always do their job well and on time.

So, all you need to do is to tell these specific employees to pass their knowledge and skills to the other employees.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many different ways of getting the best training for your staffs. The main point is to provide them with the skills and tools they need to make a good job. For more information on training, check out this article: Finding and Training Great Employees.

What has worked for you? What hasn’t worked? Leave your comments below.