It’s a well proven fact that businesses that train their team get more productivity and better results than those that don’t. Yet so many businesses still put training in the back burner as a last minute idea when they have a specific skill that they need to bring in fast. But believe me when I tell you, you are selling yourself short.
Constructing capabilities into your team is one of the most important things that you can do to ensure your competitiveness in the future. But none of these comes without a plan. Now people think that training plans are something for big business and don’t apply to small and medium size business, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Even though you don’t have in-house ability to have your own trainers or large training budget like larger companies, you still can set up a very effective training framework that will allow each one of your team members to step up. So how do you do it?
First of all you have to start with a “crawl, walk, run” philosophy. This means people need to be built up over time.
Crawl – Here we mean have good induction procedures, basic systems to help people with their jobs, and also ensuring when you’re doing recruitment that you did so with minimum skills set required for the role already defined before someone comes on board with you. Most of your training at this point to be on the job walks through clear defined procedures and routines in your business.
Walk – This is where you start to actually have a tailored training plan for each of your team members. Work out what are the top 3 capabilities you want from that team member based on their role. Once you’ve worked out these, then work back and work out what training resources can be made available. Focusing on on-the-job, online, self-pace training, outsourced training; either by private training companies or government run training outside of hours. Get clear on what they will be able to achieve once the training is in place and that gives you a goal for their training as well.
Run – Here is where you bring from training into the real life application of the skills that they’re learning. Plan successive assignments that will allow people to show you their skills. Put them into stages of increasing complexity. After they have completed an assignment, ask questions to find out what they have learnt and what they can do better next time.
You can use this very basic system of “crawl, walk and run” to be part of your team’s performance review so you can check consistently on their progress throughout the course of the year.
It doesn’t have to be complex; you just need to have a basic one page plan. Your team naturally wants to improve their skill set; this will give them a direction so they know that they can move forward with developing their skills with your business backing.
Now if you’re thinking how tough it is to do this and how much time it’s going to take, just stop and pause for a moment and think of how much time it takes to work with an untrained team.
Article By: Steve Smit – Reality Consulting
