Training is too often overlooked and underutilized. People will get job training when they start, and never again. We, as leaders, do our people a disservice by failing to reinvest time and knowledge into employees, colleagues, and partners. Considering we are near to the birthday of the United States, I felt some foundational ideas for your new training program would be appropriate.
Training overview: good training never stops.
You (leaders/owners/managers) have a responsibility to promote a culture of continuous learning and growth for your people. Leveraging these needs requires structure. If you don't have one or know where to start, I'm here to help you.
The beginning
New people need to learn the ropes correct? Let's assemble a mechanism to get your new hires up to speed quickly. This solution has a few components.
- Training requirements for the job. Leverage the job description to build out the full scope of what instructions are must-haves vs. which are not.
- Training plan. Everyone gets a plan when they hire. Make a template, one you can finesse if someone is filling a specific need first and will need to be more rounded later.
- Mentor. New employees get a mentor. They share responsibility for the initial plan getting done on time.
- Training variations. Based on jobs, establish what positions need to practically know how to do a thing vs. when they need to know something exists. Nonnegotiable pieces for complete understanding here are your quality policy, your mission, and vision.
Maintaining excellence
Great, people are trained, working well, now what? Now we get into the harder part. Continuous training is a must-have for professional organizations. People who do assembly (if assembly is your thing) need to be experts at their procedures. They need to be able to teach the next new person. Maintaining excellence of performance can be accomplished with the tools below.
- Continuous training plan. What are you going to teach people and when. Make a plan and stick to it. Each department should have one. The company should have a high-level plan.
- Structured mentoring. The mentor for new people should be replaced by a long term, professional mentoring arrangement once they complete their first plan. The mentors need to have a handoff. Both mentoring structures can support the other in finding the best matches for the long term arrangement.
- Professional development activities. Support your people expanding their professional competencies. Bring in trainers. Add workshops to the continuous program. Get them professional certificates. Every organization has different needs, so how this occurs can vary widely.
Expanding competencies
Beyond professional development is building well rounded humans within your business. The better understanding your ops people have of what shipping does the better. We should do what we can with training tools to enable each department to serve the others.
- Cross training. Teach your assemblers what inspectors look for. Of course they should know the specs for what they are building. Knowledge of their process customer will improve workmanship quality.
- Support higher education. However it fits to do this in your organization, go for it. Attach systems like this to mentoring outcomes.
- Culture activities to drive quality. Incorporate quality principles into the continuous training plans. Install them in the mentoring platforms.
The why
If you've read any of my work here, I am a die-hard for Deming's foundational work. Training is an essential tool in moving the needle towards realizing what Deming was talking about. Training is a realization about people -they are your most valuable assets. We should consider training an investment in our operations just as we do for a new CNC mill or a building renovation. Some great "whys" for you to have a training program:
- You will improve quality of product or service
- People who are invested in will manifest this with loyalty and cultural buy-in
- Activities like mentoring and cross training build organizational cohesion
Getting started with training is often a time commitment rather than a monetary one. I would bet you already have the bones of a system just based on what I've outlined here. If you're selling something, you already understand output specifications at each stop in the path to the customer. You know the why behind each section of your system. If you've read this far you can probably come up with one or two ideal mentors for your needs.
Next steps
Training is a huge component of my interest in helping businesses improve. If you like even one of the ideas I've presented here today yet don't know where to start, call me. Setup a free consultation.
Together, we'll start somewhere.
