Why Don't My Employees Get It? Part Two - Training Employees

In my last blog post (a month ago), I mentioned that there are three reasons why your employees typically underperform to your expectations:

 1. Poor hiring decisions

 2. Poor on-boarding and training

 3. Poor delegation

 As you recall, all three reasons that contribute to underperforming employee performance are all under the control of the owner, executive or manager. Last time I blogged about how to improve the hiring process. Now we are going to talk about on-boarding and training.

 After reading the last post, you went out made your next hire. So we know we now have the right employee. They have the right skills, personality and attitude. So if they fail, it is not because they are the wrong fit. What are we going to do to ensure that the new hire lives up to the new hire hype?

I will tell you what won’t work. The folklore approach. What I mean by that is you can’t just pass knowledge and information from one employee to the next employee and so on. You’d be surprised at how many companies I talk to do this and then they can’t understand why they have inconsistent performance between employees. The training program becomes a big game of telephone operator. Each time the message gets delivered a little bit changes, until the message doesn’t even resemble the original.

I believe an effective new employee training program should resemble the following Chinese Proverb.

‎"Tell me, and I'll forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I'll understand."

1. How can we do that?

 1. Cleary define the role, responsibilities and expectations in writing.

 2. Provide clear documentation (in writing) on how to perform each task that is required to fulfill their role and responsibilities and meet expectations.

 3. Walk through the documentation with the new hire and provide real examples that relate to the documentation (i.e. screenshots, training video, or “sandboxes”)

 4. Let the employee shadow a counterpart and ask questions, especially when reality seems to deviate from the documentation. If the deviation is real, update the documentation.

 5. Let the employee perform the task. Be available for questions. Make sure the employee documents the answers to the questions. Update the documentation if the question asked will likely be asked by the next new employee.

 6. Provide feedback on performance.

A common pushback to this approach is “I don’t have enough resources to dedicate to the documentation.” That’s fair and I’ve had to deal with this problem both as a coach and in my corporate career. A quick solution is to have your new employee fully document the process as they learn and perform the tasks. The second idea that I would recommend is that for every “issue” that arises, either update the documentation to incorporate the solution found or create an “FAQ” document for quick guidance on common issues that arise.

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