I have a tough question for you: How consistent is your employee training program?
Consistency in training is essential to the operations of your business. And yet, that is one of the biggest training mistakes I've seen as I've helped dozens of companies with their training curriculum and documented guides over the past nine years with ScreenSteps (a knowledge base and training software company).Depending on when a new hire is onboarded and who is teaching the training, a new hire's experience could be completely different. Which isn't good for the operations side of things.
Without consistent training, employees learn different ways to handle tasks and it disrupts employee performance. What you need is one ideal way to handle tasks, which requires a repeatable training.
How do you do that? By leveraging technology and creating resources that every trainee will use.
Watch this 3-minute video to learn about three resources you can create to simplify and maintain consistency in your employee training curriculum.
Resource 1: Documented procedures
The most important resource for training is documented procedures. This means everyone is receiving the same instructions no matter who is teaching the new hire class.
Without fail, every time I work with a company to define their procedures, this happens: If there are four people in a room, you’ll have four different ways to perform one procedure.
You DON’T want this happening during training in front of your learners and you don’t want it happening after training.
Define the ideal way to perform procedures ahead of training. To do this, you'll want to set up a meeting with your team of leaders. In this meeting, you'll discuss and agree on the ideal way to perform these procedures. Then you will document them.
Download this free Find & Follow Workbook to help your team plan out which guides need to be created.
One advantage of documented procedures
The great thing about your documented procedures is they will be used both during training and post-training to help all employees perform tasks.
Resource 2: Activities
With your procedures documented, the next resource you need is a list of activities. These are practice scenarios that reflect real situations employees will encounter on the job.
If they don’t practice during training, they won’t know what to do after training.
Start by creating a list of scenarios your employees with encounter on the job. Rank them from easiest to the most complex.
Throughout the training, practice scenarios and make them increasingly more difficult. Learners will then use your documented procedures in these practice sessions.
No matter who is running the training, they will have a list of on-the-job scenarios to practice. All learners will reference the same procedures, getting a consistent experience.
🔎 Related: Scenario-Based Training: Role-playing Examples for Call Center Training
Resource 3: Presentation
The final resource that will help you create a repeatable training process is presentations. These presentations are probably different from what you're used to.
Create a presentation that provides employees with an overview of the training topic or area of learning.
These can either be a slide deck or, better yet, a short video that lasts between 2-10 minutes. The purpose of the presentation is to provide quick background information and context.
Slide decks can be as simple as a title and a picture. This is just a high-level overview. They don’t go into the details of how to do procedures.
Organizing your topic introduction into quick presentations or training videos prevents trainers from going off on tangents and provides consistency in how information is delivered.
Create consistent learning and on-the-job performance
Every training session has different variables. You have new learners. You have different trainers. But when you create and use these three resources, you build a training curriculum that delivers more consistent learning and on-the-job performance.
With ScreenSteps, we use the Find & Follow Training Framework. This framework leverages these three resources and organizes them to train employees in 30 days or less. New hires learn what they need to DO, not just what they need to KNOW.
If you want to see how you can use these three resources in an employee training program, download our free New Hire Training eBook.
In this eBook, we outline how you can use these three resources in the Find & Follow Training Framework, which helps train new hires to be more knowledgeable, consistent, and efficient in 30 days or less.
