5 Steps to Implement an Effective Employee Training Program

Nowadays, in this highly competitive and dynamic industry, everyone should be an expert at what they do in order to succeed.

That is why companies, particularly large corporations, place a high value on employee training programs. This is not surprising given their emphasis on quality and desire to be recognized in the market.     

Well-trained employees can increase the market share and customer satisfaction levels due to creating a positive public image by providing high-quality services. To avoid confusion, let’s start from scratch and understand everything related to the importance of employee training. 

What is Employee training?

So what is Employee Training or otherwise called Staff Training? The question of the day and the answer of the century. 

Employee training provides workers with education and skills related to their jobs and areas of expertise to assist them in always staying up-to-date and having skills on-demand for the market. 

The Importance of Employee Training Programs

Employee Training is crucial for nowadays businesses which aim to be compatible and own the higher percentage of market share. Why is that so? Because employee training focuses on several vital criteria such as:

• Improvement of the competency of an employee: As I said before, in this dynamic industry where customer needs are constantly changing, everyone needs to stay up-to-date to meet those needs. Therefore employee training, especially for those who work in tertiary sector businesses and who directly interact with a customer, is significant. 
• Contribute to an employee's productivity and performance levels: Sometimes, employees are quite good at what they do (well, mostly they are).  However, they can be inefficient in terms of time management and complete tasks you have given them slower than expected, which is why using a reliable and accurate free time clock can help you keep track of their work hours and ensure timely completion of tasks. You can also provide employees with the right tools, including browser extensions, so they can perform tasks faster. Doing a quick Brave vs DuckDuckGo comparison can help you choose the most suitable browser extension to enhance their productivity and streamline their work process. Well, employee training focuses on the productivity improvement aspect as well.
• Improve Leadership Skills: Most training programs also focus on developing an employee's leadership and managerial skills. This opens up promotional opportunities for the best among them and keeps them motivated to perform well to get that promotion and not feel stuck at the same place. 
• Benefits that your Company gains: Employee iteration is huge in the industry and training your employees can be a great employee retention strategy you can use in 2022. When your company has good employees who can perform well, who are real team players, and managers who show democratic leadership skills, your company's success won't be far away. Good employees contribute not only to improvement of external factors such as satisfied customers and good public image. They also contribute to the development of the internal infrastructure of the business. This leads to better communication among the members, a healthier environment, and a higher focus level on a common goal.      

Types of Employee Training

Now, as it is clear what employee training is and why you would need to hold one (or several ones, even better), let’s take a look at the main types of staff training out there. 

Leadership training

So what is Leadership training? Basically, it is training on leadership skills, emotional intelligence, and interpersonal abilities of employees that will help them to lead others. This type of training is mostly performed for the managers in order to improve their skills, sometimes for other employees as well to assist them in the improvement of the skills they need for further promotion. 

This training builds foundational skills for leadership, teaches them various leadership techniques (autocratic, democratic, bureaucratic, etc.), and in which situations which one should be used. It also improves the emotional intelligence of an employee and teaches them motivational techniques to apply in order to motivate others. This type of training is meant to teach participants everything about leadership and practical strategies they need to use to be good leaders. 

Onboarding training

Onboarding training is the most common type of training performed by almost every company in order to help new employees to get on board. The main goal here is to make sure that the new employee is familiar with the work, responsibilities, company’s style, mission statement and the objectives it is trying to achieve in a specific time period. 

Main Elements that onboarding training should include are:

• Introduction to any tools that the company uses, such as work management software
• Introduction of the main objectives of the business
• Setting of expectations from the employee performance and rules everyone should follow
• Corporate culture explanations
• Team Approach introductory
• One-on-one mentoring

While HR training is popular, it can also be one of the hardest to get right. Fortunately, you can use these essential HR templates and forms to help you create an incredible onboarding training program that gets new staff members up to speed. However, make sure you also invest in HR software development and train your HR staff to offer a great onboarding experience, as employees will need quality mentors to be successful. You will also need to learn how to make a real pay stub to ensure accurate documentation of employees' earnings and deductions, contributing to a smooth payroll process and fostering trust within the organization.

Product training

This is another common type of employee training. Product training is a learning program that aims to provide all your employees with a thorough understanding of a product. It also enhances their ability to communicate with customers about the company's products or services. 

Product knowledge training does not require you to be an expert, but it does require you to have a fundamental understanding of the product or service the organization provides and how it works. That's why partnering with an operations recruiter can be invaluable for identifying and onboarding employees with strong capabilities relevant to your specific products. Whether hiring for sales, customer support or product development teams, an experienced operations recruiter helps ensure all new hires receive sufficient product training so they can represent your offerings confidently and accurately.

Compliance training

Employee training that is required by law, or policy is known as compliance training. It informs your staff about the laws and regulations that apply to their particular job area or industry. Still not clear? Do not worry, just take a look at some examples, and it will become clear as the day. 

Examples:

• HR Law
• Anti-Harassment Training
• Information Security Training
• Diversity Policies Training 

These laws, policies and regulations, along with the requirement of such training are primarily in place to ensure the workplace's safety and the employee's dignity. 

Technical training

The whole purpose of technical staff training is to ensure that your employees have the first-hand skills that are needed to get the job done. Specialized (technical) training is related to skill development, e.g., for SEO's, it is to keep up with SEO trends, for lawyers to keep up and know about every new law and any adjustments in the existing ones. 

Technical training is important not only for the business to ensure that the employee performs well and does everything as required, but also to keep the employees and have loyal ones. According to statistics, 68% of employees leave their jobs due to the lack of training and no opportunity to grow both in terms of promotion and in terms of skills development. 

Sales training

Just try to imagine what a good sales team is capable of. That is right; it can take your business to a whole new level, generate sales, profit, increase revenue, and, of course, generate tons of new expansion opportunities and incredible collaboration with other companies. You got it, right? Sales training is very important for your business success. Good sales training will enhance the person-to-person connection, interpersonal skills, and emotional intelligence level with good sales training. 

How to make an Employee Training Program more effective?

The task of the day is to make an Employee Training program as efficient as it can be, because that will result in multiple benefits for your business. Each effective training program has similar characteristics, and here is one for the employee training specifically. 

#1 Capture Your Company Needs and Establish Goals

So first things first - the number one step to take is to make a clear list of your company's goals, objectives, and mission statements. Why do you need to do that? Because you do not want to waste your money, you want to invest it like a smart person with a wealthy mindset. And to invest it in something correctly, you have to know in what exactly and for what. Maybe there are employees who require a unique approach that you can only carry out through another service provider, let’s say, an initiative like the Aged Care Award. Then, you should calculate your future actions accordingly.

Try to comprehend at which point your business is right now, its objectives, and your next steps, tactics, and strategies towards achieving your goals. When you are clear on this one, you will understand in which areas you need to implement employee training. Maybe you need to strengthen your sales team or managerial team? Or new employees, or even every single employee you have. Who knows? - Only you have the answer to that question. 

After you complete this step and are clear about what training programs your company needs, let's move on to the next one. 

#2 Choose the Right Software Platform for Your Pieces of Training

Software, basically the platform within which you are going to hold those training programs, plays a crucial role in the quality of your services. You can research a bit on how to prepare a good virtual training and come back to learn about the best platforms to choose from. 

There are a variety of one-time training platforms available, including Zoom, Google Meetings, and Microsoft Teams, or any other virtual company meeting platform. Of course, those are nice, but keep in mind that you will be having constant and various training sessions with your personnel. As a result, you must assess the platform's pricing, availability, and user-friendliness of an interface before making the final choice of a platform to go with.   Therefore, I recommend choosing a platform where you can access multiple courses, as well as have the opportunity to develop your own website with individual training programs.     

An Example of such a platform is Uteach. It offers various courses from different creators that you can easily purchase and train your employees with. However, it is worth mentioning that in Uteach, you can also open a separate website with customized design, publish ready-to-use courses and hold live session courses for different employee groups within your company (even outside of your organization, which will give you extra income). Let’s take a look at the main features:

• Offer quizzes, tests & certifications
• Blog
• 14-day free trial run
• Custom Domain 
• Free Hosting 
• Unlimited Opportunities 
• Mobile-Friendly Design 
• Language Choice 
• Any Other Feature You Like 

 No extra expenses, huge amount of saved time and high quality all in one, Uteach. 

#3 Offer Useful, Personalized, and Engaging Employee Learning Experiences

When you are clear on the goals, types of training programs needed, and the platform, your next step will be "making it all personal." We are human beings, and in every aspect of our lives, the thing that interests us most is "what's in it for me." 

When your employees participate in the training, they are interested in what they will gain from that training program, so making their experience personalized is a must-do. Besides, also pay attention to the engagement levels. Do not offer boring training that reminds them of a lecture; make it interactive; you could do that by including warm-up games, making jokes, using icebreakers, and asking them questions about their experiences in the field. 

Now let's look at the most efficient ways to make digital learning as productive as it could possibly be:

• Choose long-term Value over Short-term performance: Your return on investment will be high-performance of your employees. But if they are not motivated to make some tips, they have learned a habit; if they are forced to take the training because it is required, your ROI level won't meet your expectations in the long term. 
• Establish Clear Goals & give some reasoning: What will employees learn, and why do they need to learn that. Your employees have a choice; help them to realize that. Motivate them to participate in the training and give sound reasoning behind how that will help them advance in their careers. 
• Value their time: Implementing training that requires employees to sit for hours at a time is negatively affecting their ability to perform other tasks and daily priorities. Look/create a training program that includes short courses and videos that employees may complete in under 30 minutes. This will make training less intimidating, and will not interfere with their productivity. And most importantly will not make them take a look at their phones thinking, "why am I even here" or "when is this gonna end." 
• Measure results: In every training, you should implement some techniques to measure the progress results. First of all, that will help you comprehend the true effectiveness of the training, and secondly, achievement of goals will become easier if you know what weak spots are and what has to be strengthened. One way to do this is by Testing them, then collecting the test results and analyzing the scores they got. 
• Make it available: If someone cannot take the training right away, it is good to have ready recording and permit employees to take it remotely or later on when they are done with the primary task and have some free time. 

#4 Choose the Right Time to Deliver Training to Staff

Jumping on to the next step: Delivering it at the RIGHT TIME. Let's imagine you ordered a pizza, and it was like 4 hours ago. They made it in an hour but did not bother to bring it. Your pizza got cold, lost its taste. They delivered it approximately 5 hours later, and you had to pay then warm it up. After you warmed it up, you tasted it, and it was not the same cause it was already late. A similar situation is going on inside your company. If you have a weak spot but are not doing anything to solve it now, when you actually take time and solve it, later on, it may not be as efficient and result-rich as it would've been if you did it at the RIGHT TIME. 

Enough Philosophy, anyway. There are some cases that clearly Scream it is the RIGHT TIME, and those cases are:

• Onboarding training for each new employee
• Annual training for staff 
• Product training before its launch

With other training programs, the right time is highly individual.      

#5 Track, Analyze, and Improve

Educational programs aren't set in stone, and the outcomes of one course aren't certain to reoccur. Everyone is different, therefore they experience your training approach differently, what works for some may not work for others. So it is extremely important to track and measure the results, and show an individual approach to each of them when needed. 

Here are some techniques that will help you evaluate the processes a lot easier:

• Analyze the test results: If you see some questions repeatedly get wrong answers, probably it is because the content, the material was not sufficient enough. 
• Take surveys: give your employees after they complete training surveys, and ask them to answer the question "what did they learn from it".
• Begin measurements of customer satisfaction level: If the training goal was to increase customer satisfaction, try to measure it with surveys and quizzes to analyze at what percentage it is achieved. Consider implementing a structured evaluation system, including surveys and quizzes, to quantitatively measure the success of the training initiative in enhancing customer satisfaction and, subsequently, use the data collected to calculate and refine the customer satisfaction index for a more nuanced assessment.
• Ask Employee's opinion: Ask them all what they think about the training program, whether it is useful, and what they would improve. 

Also, I wanted to mention that most of the analytical part you can do digitally to save some time with Google Analytics, plus if you choose Uteach as your platform, it is worth mentioning that Google Analytics integrates with Uteach.  

Conclusion

So that was all! I'm extremely proud of you since reading this article all the way to the end demonstrates your commitment to your company's success. 

Now I think it is time for you to take the first step towards Success, because only thinking about it won't make it a reality. If you were looking for a hint or sign, here it is, the whole universe screams “Hey YOU! go to Uteach and start your training programs!”. 

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