Employee training is a goliath of a task, and it’s not an area where you can’t afford to be scarce on time and resources. The more effective your training is, the more productive your newly onboarded employees will be. It’s an investment, and when you streamline your training as much as possible, you can drastically reduce resource expenditure while still enabling flexibility and a tailored training experience.
Training your employees sustainably in the most time-efficient manner begins with identifying how much of each individual’s training can be provided through readily available documents and how much one-on-one training is required. Imagine this: You store basic company knowledge that all employees need to know and is evergreen in a ZIP file that you provide during onboarding. Then, all that new employees need to know is how to convert ZIP files to PDFs in order to access a plethora of training at their fingertips.
If you’re far from this reality, it does mean devoting some time to creating this documentation, but the payoff is profound. Here, we explore how you can begin tailoring your training sustainably.
How to sustainably tailor your employee training
Employee training should be personalized to each individual and role. That way, employees’ personal learning needs are catered to, and the intricacies of the role are explained well. Tailored training also helps employees feel supported and welcomed, as they feel their unique needs have been considered.
While some one-on-one human training is essential, it’s not sustainable to walk each employee through every process that makes up your business. A large chunk of training information can be shared through readily available information. By preparing documents that walk employees through the ins and outs of your organization and their department, you save ample time by only having to go through training steps once.
But how do you know what information can be shared in documents and what requires one-on-one training? This is where it pays to get as specific as possible about your company by breaking out the departments and positions into clearly defined needs. Follow these steps to iron out the training sections:
1. Outline roles
First, outline departments and define roles within each area of the business. An organizational chart is a graph that outlines the employee structure within a business. Once you have a strong idea of the various departments and roles, you can organize this information into a rough organizational chart, branching the chart into departmental heads and then further branching into sub-leads and their team.
2. Assess the needs of each role
With a clear idea of roles, define the responsibilities and needs of each department and role. Start at the basics, such as software, logins, work equipment, and corporate knowledge required. You will begin to see a lot of overlap between roles, especially for basic needs and knowledge.
3. Identify what information should be company-wide training
Consider employee training across your entire company as building a house. All houses have the same foundation and bones; it’s not until the design elements and finishings come into play that they require personalization. All of the generic corporate knowledge and basic technical tasks lay the foundation from which more specific training can be provided to develop a strong structure.
This task involves analyzing the overlap of the roles within your business and outlining what required training information is consistent across the organization. Think very high-level. Organizational charts, email signatures, and client lists are typical areas that everyone should understand. For training that is sustainable to tailor, this is a great place to start because it is information that everyone in your organization should have.
Basic technical tasks
Your employees will enter your organization with different levels of soft skills. These days, you can safely assume that people know how to use a computer, but there will be technical tasks that you use frequently in the day-to-day of your workplace that you might have come to take for granted. Take stock of technical tasks you perform regularly at work while planning your employee training, as these will help you start to form a strong list of must-have knowledge.
Corporate knowledge
Corporate knowledge is the information that staff need to perform their work effectively. A corporate knowledge base is where you store this information, which might be Google Drive or SharePoint. In the base, you can store essential pieces of information like product documentation, company policies and procedures, image banks, or shared log-in information, amongst others. Stay on the lookout for free online education so you can continue providing opportunities for your teams to upskill and develop their knowledge.
Office etiquette
New employees won’t be familiar with your workplace and office space’s requirements, rules, and nuances. You may have specific processes to enter the building. In these break-out rooms, coworkers can have casual conversations, rules around personal phone calls, and other requirements to sustain a healthy and comfortable work environment.
Client background
The foundation of client background information is something every employee should know.
While new employees may need ongoing support to learn about their clients or customers and their needs, the basics of client background can be shared through readily available documents prepared for onboarding.
Separate training by department
With the basics covered, your training should filter into specific departmental knowledge and skills, as someone entering the IT team isn’t going to need to know the same processes as someone with the HR department. Within departments, there will be additional processes and skills that can be outlined in a document in text, where the new employee can share and download the information without the need for one-on-one training.
Processes
Be sure to document all the straightforward processes that are ambiguous. For example, filling out a spreadsheet from static data is not uncertain and can be explained through documentation. However, assessing a campaign’s performance will require more context to interpret and should be left for one-on-one training.
You probably move through dozens of processes within any single working day. They often just feel like normal work. For an outsider who doesn’t have the context of what you’re doing yet, it’s clear you’re following a process. Let’s explore what you do when you check your emails. Sounds like a simple and intuitive task, but there is a process to it. When you open your app or email site, you might hit the inbox, and your eyes might scan for anything that seems important before you reply to the priority emails and flag anything you’re saving for later. Then, maybe you delete new spam emails before moving on to your next task.
Now, we’re not saying to train someone on how to check their emails, but you might perform processes on unfamiliar software that you don’t realize are processes. It’s important to get specific about processes the new employees need to know and include them in training documentation so they can follow along and refer to them whenever they need a refresher. Try to list as many straightforward processes as possible and describe them in as much detail.
Software
Consider which software your department uses for its processes. You can provide both high-level and more detailed accounts of how to use software for work tasks within the training documentation.
For example, a workplace where engineers use AutoCAD for their designs will want to outline all related processes so that a new engineer can learn and start working efficiently. This would include step-by-step processes for:
- How to create an account
- How to join a workspace or project
- How to create their designs
- How to save and share their designs
- How AutoCAD is integrated with other software, like project management platforms
Your organization may combine this training into a single document or break out the processes into separate sheets. The key thing to remember is that explaining as many processes as you can in readily available documents reduces the future resources required to train employees.
Hone in on specific roles
When you’ve wrung out the juices that make up the basis of your departmental processes, you can hone further in on specific roles. If you’ve ever created a handover document, here you can recreate a handover document for specific roles but only include the tasks, processes, and software that are unique to the position, assuming that shared processes are already captured in departmental training documents.
Create shareable documents that outline processes
Once you’ve ironed out the process for the company, departments, and toles, it’s time to get it on paper. Start by creating digital documents of the primary processes within your business, such as how to apply for leave, how to add an email signature, organizational chart, and client details.
The way you organize this network of knowledge is up to you. You might prefer to create a Master document for set-up and onboarding that outlines steps and includes processes for each, or you can link steps out to separate documents that detail the process. Store the documents in one folder for each role or department and compress it into a ZIP file, so it’s compressed and ready to be sent to employees-in-training.
So, where is direct contact needed?
By following the steps we’ve outlined so far, you can tailor your employee training as much as possible and essentially document every process, task, and piece of information that is trainable without direct contact. It’s a neat network of detailed employee training that feeds right up to an individual’s position, saving you endless time on future training. However, while it can outline the skeleton of many roles, solely following documents doesn’t make up an entire training process, and doing so can inhibit employee retention.
Feedback
Many employees learn best by performing the tasks themselves and then receiving feedback. Feedback is as important as the performance. Without it, it’s a bit like launching an archery arrow without checking the target and correcting the grip. Let your training employees know they should ask for feedback once they complete the tasks or processes in the training documentation, particularly the more complex and crucial ones. From here, you can ask them how they approached the task and provide any required corrections.
The process of feedback can be two-dimensional, and you can ask your employees how their training documentation can be improved and what gaps need to be filled. This will help you understand what to cover in one-on-one training with the individual and make your training more sustainable by improving the training documentation in accordance with employee feedback.
Personalization
On paper, documented training could be sufficient for an onboarding process. However, workplaces are flexible and adaptive; departments and positions evolve, and individuals learn uniquely. Employee training should be personalized to the individual and the role, and this requires direct, one-on-one training and discussion – you want to make sure employees feel comfortable and supported.
Fill in the gaps of the workplace
Consider the role that the training employee is taking. There are likely to be some tasks and responsibilities unique to the position, and there is little point in creating documentation for processes that only one person will be managing. For these gaps in the workplace, you can hone in on direct, in-person training to add a more supportive training element that walks the employee through the final pieces of their knowledge requirements.
New roles
When businesses grow, they require new roles and responsibilities. Perhaps the head of the department may know what this looks like, but since it’s a position that wasn’t held by anyone before this, processes won’t be outlined. Here, you can walk the person through the needs of the new roles, describe what is involved, and work with them to develop processes for their tasks.
Account for unique learning requirements
Ask your new employees if they have any unique learning needs and brainstorm how you can cater to them. This might include translating the documents to other languages if you work within a global organization or breaking the training into more manageable chunks of learning if they have learning challenges.
Complex and ambiguous processes
Some processes will need one-on-one guidance. If you’re training someone taking your role, take stock of the processes you perform and highlight any that you think will require direct support. Tasks that are complex, require analyzing information, or where there is ambiguity and need to be interpreted from an informed perspective typically require one-on-one training.
Even the inside scoop, less official company knowledge like who has the best relationship with a client or where to get the best coffee near the office, can and should be fed through personal conversations.
A roadmap to training that is both sustainable and tailored
The role of a trainer is to onboard employees as effectively as possible – which means making them feel comfortable and providing them access to the knowledge they need to perform in their role. Of course, personalization and direct training are important to make them feel at home in their role because you want to cultivate a work environment that values verbal communication. This will help you facilitate employee productivity and create a more enjoyable workplace.
However, from an organizational perspective, direct training is wasteful if unnecessary. So, tailoring training sustainably by identifying what can be taught through documentation and what requires one-on-one training is beneficial. Following the steps in the piece provides you with a detailed roadmap to begin creating training documentation that will boost the efficiency of your workplace training while saving resources long into the future.
