Well-trained employees are the best employees as they work efficiently and effectively. Training is a way to empower your employees with the necessary skills, knowledge, and understanding so that they can be their best professional selves, while also making them feel valued by providing them up-gradation and growth opportunities; thus improving employee retention.Â
For bigger organizations, the employee training budget is not a very big concern, but for smaller businesses, budget and resources will always be a big limitation. But that doesn’t mean they should cut down the training process completely or even compromise with the quality of training as there are various cost-effective methods to be used.
For example, one of the best and the most cost-effective ways to deliver training is through a learning management system like Talent LMS that provides enough tools and features that can be used to design wonderful training courses that can help your employees to work up to their full potential and help your business grow significantly faster.
Here are some of the best practices to train your small business employees that can be blended with an ideal learning management system;
Planning
Planning can give your training a better direction and clarity. Without a proper plan, the course you are providing might turn out to be irrelevant and useless, and thus it might even end up wasting everyone’s time.
List out your goals and objectives of training your employees, understand what skills and knowledge they need to do their job better. Decide what is absolutely necessary and what is not. Now that you know what exactly to teach, plan your course material as well. Plan the structure of your course. Maybe start with the basics and go towards more advanced topics.
Along with the objective and course planning, this step might even include understanding the skill gaps of your employees as it is crucial that everyone at least knows some basic concepts to be on the same page. Once you have identified these tiny faults and gaps, formulate a plan of action for that as well.
Regular sessions
You cannot just provide training to your employees twice a year and then miraculously expect good results. Human beings have limited retention abilities and to increase these abilities, an adequate amount of time and repetition is needed. No! not even when you have a small business and a budget issue.
Don’t rush your training program. Give your employees ample amount of time to learn, understand, and retain the knowledge by providing regular sessions for important topics.
Peer learning
One of the best practices that you can see in the corporate world is peer learning or collaborative learning. This practice is not just more effective than the regular scenario where an external instructor comes to teach or the learners are forced to interact with the superiors of the company but it is also way more cost-effective as there are not many additional charges that you have to pay the instructor.
Many of your existing employees are experts in their own work as they have more experience. Using these star employees as instructors for training the new joining employees can be very beneficial as the new employees will be pretty comfortable interacting with them as they will see them as their peers. This will also save you a lot of money which is pretty great for a small business.
Cross-training
As a small business, you might go through a shortage of employees sometimes as there are already a limited number of employees working in your business and as someone calls in sick, things can go haywire. Cross-training your employees can do wonders in this situation for you as a small business owner. Cross-training enables your employees to take up multiple jobs when needed along with doing their primary job.
Conclusion
As a small business owner, it may look like training your employees is a tough job because of various limiting factors. But with proper planning and the right kind of tools, it becomes pretty time and cost-effective.