We need to improve the employee experience. Our inexperienced team of people are eager and want to learn, and they do so quickly. We need to get them ready for a big seasonal push that’s coming within a few short weeks. I don’t want them making costly mistakes, or saying yes to something before checking in first. Or sitting around waiting to be told what to do for that matter. They’re bright, and I know they can handle it. I want to get them started right, and do that quickly.
Thoughts of the Day: Address employee experience challenges. Getting things done right is important. Layout a training plan, in writing. Test for comprehension in small doses. Look for trainers within the pool of people who do the work already. Get out of the way to find out if they can do it. Move people around until you get the right fit.
Improve employee experience
Doing work without mistakes saves time, effort, and money. Multiply revenue by 1%. That’s a dollar estimate of what each 1% increase in costs related to errors means to your business. That should be motivation enough to make it worth your while. Figure out how to move new people into the workforce. Do it with as little disruption and as few errors as possible.
Before you put people to work, prepare some written instructions. They’ll pick up more if you back that up with written notes they can refer to. Ask people to make corrections to the training notes as they go through the day. Note what doesn’t make sense, or what’s done differently from the way it was described. Incorporate corrections into future training.
Measure progress. Decide how much teach each day. The first round of training is the hardest. Set benchmarks based on the first group’s progress after the first round. If error rates spike up, slow down the training until the error rate drops.
Understand key milestones
Consider the following strategies to enhance the employee experience. Go through each routine or job that people will be performing and lay out the parameters. Identify who should be consulted if there’s a question. Put it in writing. Who to go to for what.
Set up a time at the end of each day to review how things went. Focus first on what went well and their daily progress. Then talk about what went wrong, what errors or problems people encountered.
Encourage people to discuss problems openly. Ask them to describe how they dealt with the challenges they ran into, and what they learned. Identify people who are struggling. Assign someone to work with them one-on-one. Wrap up with an encouragement for the next day, by focusing on the progress made so far.
Start the next day with a brief meeting. Go over what has been learned. Remind people about lessons from the previous day’s wrap-up. Ask if anyone had any insights overnight that they’d like to share.
Help people do their best work
Find competent trainers who can teach people what to do and act as positive role models. Look at the pool of people who already do the job well. Ask one or two of them to do training part-time. Look for trainers who take pride in a job well done, who do it with a smile, and who are good at encouraging those around them to enjoy what they’re doing.
Think twice about moving someone into training just because they’re good at the task. Make sure they have good people skills as well. A big part of training is motivating and encouraging people. Record analytics to improve the employee experience.
Steadily ramp up the tasks people perform. If they make mistakes, see if they recognize they’ve made a mistake and if they can fix it on their own. Give people a chance to show you without interrupting. If possible, make people figure out how to fix their mistakes instead of fixing them for them. If they don’t get it, then show them how to do the task and ask them to do it exactly the way you showed them.
Consider that people may have hidden talents. You might hire a person to do one task, and then find out they’re really good at something else. Don’t be afraid to switch people around. Move someone else in to do the task you hired this person for. Move this person on to the tasks for which they’ve shown more aptitude.
Looking for a good book? Enterprise Performance Done Right: An Operating System for Your Organization, by Ron Dimon.
