Training new staff is a discipline that takes some time to get right. Onboarding in your business may work differently than in the last business someone may have worked for, meaning that even experienced hires may need to go over the basics when working for your firm, to begin with.
However, it’s also true that where you fall on the training spectrum will differ from hire to hire. For instance, it may take a lot of work to train a new teenage employee in your store, even though their relatively fresh perspective and open-canvas-like mind will allow them to pick up your particular ways of doing things more quickly than those already set in their habits.
As you can see, there are pros and cons to every approach. In this post then, we’ll discuss a few worthwhile onboarding measures, using a complete approach, the willingness to develop lasting knowledge, and the comforting of your new hire in their environment to be the top markers of success. Without further ado, please consider some of the following advice:
Assess Their Skills & Weaknesses
Assessing the skills and weaknesses of your staff is not a means by which to catch them out or a measure of making them feel inferior or superior in certain situations. All it means is that a staff member coming into your company may be more or less familiar with given practices, business standards, and idiosyncrasies your firm requires of new staff. Assessing how they fit within that using mini-evaluations and interview questions can help you assess how to train them more readily.
Train Them From The Ground Up
It’s best not to simply assume that our staff know how to do something, even if they’re educated or experienced in that field. Asking them politely just to double-check, referring them to educational materials your firm has written up, and making sure that they can ask for guidance whenever they need it is key to helping new staff feel comfortable within your firm, while also settling any insecurities or questions they might have. For instance, walking them through your point of sale system now is key, even if they’ve used one before. It’s better to iron out the kinks now than to suffer for them at a later stage, especially because built-up habits can be hard to undo.
Field Any Questions At Any Time
Staff have a lot to take in when they onboard with your business. No matter how thorough and rehearsed your onboarding process can be, they won’t have taken in 100% of it. It’s just the nature of the human mind. Getting their bearings is tough enough, and being told a bunch of information in short order, even with good note-taking, doesn’t necessarily translate to familiarity. For that reason, it’s good to make sure they can field questions with you at any time, as well as assigning one person on the team they can turn to if they need to ask a question, no matter how seemingly ‘simple,’ can work wonders.
With this advice, we hope you can continue to properly train new staff and onboard them in the best way.