Employee training for an empowered workforce

Your Operations Solved

Hello and welcome to Your Operations Solved, for Tuesday, April 27th, 2021

I'm your host, Channing Norton, of PC Solutions, and this is the 15th episode of our show,
Listen to us Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, or on our Saturday compilation episodes. If you find the show helpful or informative, please do give it a like on your platform of choice, or share it to someone else who might also enjoy it.

I do apologize for the lack of episodes on Thursday and Saturday. I have been immensely under the weather after my second dose of my Covid Vaccine, and was unable to produce the show. Our future production schedule will not be affected
With that out of the way, let's get started on today's headline,

Lawmakers heard testimony from google and apple last wednesday in regard to alleged monopolistic practices of the company's app stores. Combined with the additional interest lawmakers seem to be taking in the ARM/Nvidia aquisition we examined last week, and oversight in the wake of the SolarWinds breach, it would appear that legislatures are more willing to get involved in the technology industry. The industry as a whole has been left largely without regulation over the past 25 years, which has resulted in the rise of a few dozen tech giants into perhaps 8 or 9 major niches which they thoroughly dominate while providing little in the way of innovation, or consumer friendly practices. As such, I feel this additional attention to be beneficial for consumers and small businesses alike.

In regard to the App store question, it has previously been proposed in the EU, as well as by representative Ocasio Cortez, that companies should not be permitted to own both a marketplace and proudcts on that marketplace. For instance, Apple could choose to have its own, apple endorsed News app, OR an app store that sells or offers news apps, but not both, or amazon, which could EITHER sell batteries online, or have their own "Amazon basics" battery line. This proposal is made to recognize that, unlike in the brick and mortar space, in digital storefronts, companies have a significant ability to both undercut their in market competition on margins, while also promoting their products more uniquely and effectively on that storefront by say, giving themselves priority listings in search results, than any non marketplace competitor could ever hope to. Specific responses have not yet been revealed by the House, but it is likely that changes will at least be proposed. We will be sure to keep you up to date on them when they are revealed.

With that done, let's move to our main conversation today, talking about standardizing your employee training materials and process.

If you are like most small businesses, your hiring process is very fly by night. You get some resumes, have an interview, hire the most qualified candidate you can find, they start, and are dropped into their position and told to figure it out, and directed to a similar employee who they can ask for help while learning. This, while easy from the businesses perspective, is less than ideal, as it will take a long time, usually the better part of a year for white collar workers, for the employee to be as effective as they are capable of being. This makes sense, as, while the new hire might well be an expert in the field of work they are performing, they are NOT an expert in YOUR BUSINESS. As such, their learning process is one of figuring out how to make their academic knowledge of the field apply to your business practices and specific environmental concerns, like the exact mix of software you have, or your management structure. Let's take a look at how we can optimize this process to get more out of our employees earlier, with less investment in training.

1st, We need to have clearly defined and bounded job roles, which can be accomplished via SOPs, and a central repository for them to be delivered on. Giving the new hire these documents allows them to have a final source of truth for how to do their job. That being said, having a giant pile of procedures dropped on an employee is likely to give you... less than effective results on its own.

2nd, We need to have an effective means of communicating the core duties, tasks, and procedures to our hire. This will vary by field to field and position to position, but generally, we see this done in two ways, shadowing senior employees, and training videos. I find that traditional training videos provided by software vendors to be lacking. Typically they focus on HOW to do a task, but fail to give the context of WHEN to do the task, as that question is specific to your business. This impedes their usefulness dramatically.

3rd, we need a way to handle edge cases. After a few days or weeks, new hires tend to know how to do the broad strokes of their job, but still need to ask supervisors for when they get tripped up. This is a way to solve the problem, but interrupts workflows of both the hire and the manager, so can be less than ideal.

4th, we need to communicate priorities of how the work should be performed. For instance, is speed or accuracy more important in this particular role? What order should tasks be performed in. Stuff like that.

5th, we need to help our hire pick up new skills necessary to perform the work that they did not originally possess

6th, and finally, we need to communicate to employees how to do their job most efficiently. The more advanced tips and tricks that you want them to pick up.

Trying to communicate all this in the first few days of a new job for someone, along with everybody's names, can be very overwhelming, so, let's look at how we can change this up with technology, specifically adaptive learning technology.

Adaptive learning is a technology that allows learning materials to restructure themselves in response to a learner's performance. Much like a tutor might assign a student additional homework problems on a topic they struggle with, so too adaptive learning will identify gaps in an employees skills, and direct additional focus to those gaps to keep them engaged by not covering information they already know, and improve their knowledge retention by covering the content thoroughly until mastery is directly demonstrated.

On the first day of our employees' new job, they are introduced to your business, your mission statement, and company culture, as well as their workgroup. Fundamentally, the goal of the first day is for them to understand the model by which your company makes money, and the role in which they will be serving the company in that respect. Fairly standard stuff.

Next, on day two, they should shadow someone with the same responsibilities, to see what the work performed will actually look like.

For the remaining 3 days of their first week, they will find themselves enrolled in the adaptive learning, in a course created by your company for employee training that focuses on your business processes.

Day 6, they will spend performing the task supervised directly by their shadow the first half of the day, with more adaptive learning in the second half.

Day 7, they get introduced to the Standard Operating Procedure library, and once again perform their work supervised, albeit at a greater distance.

Day 8, their mentor begins referring their questions to the SOPs to get the employee used to how the library is structured.

Day 9, Employee is now unsupervised and fully capable of doing their job.

After 30 days, employee is enrolled in an adaptive learning course discussing how to work most efficiently at their tasks, which they complete continually for 1-2 hours a week. This continued education can be used to introduce new skills, build confidence in areas of weakness, or prepare an employee for promotion, all without much direct supervision.

By having a structured and standardized approach to training, we have ensured that our employee gets up to the level of competence we would expect after two weeks of traditional training by the end of day 6, and the competence we could expect from a year of experience in their position after around 60 days. While obviously exact results will vary by field and individual employee, these numbers are consistent with research on the matter. The other side benefit of this structure is the demand placed on the mentor is dramatically reduced, as there are fewer interruptions by the trainee to their mentor. I've worked to implement this structure several times with dramatic results each time.

So, I hope you have seen how a better approach to your employee training can get your new hires productive faster, make training less of a burden on your operation, and help you introduce continuing education topics to your employees, but what are the knock on effects?

Well, with this system, you are communicating that your standard operating proceedures are the final authority for ambiguity. By doing so, you enforce more standardization in your product delivery. You are also helping get your employees settled in faster, and better, which puts less strain on both employee and manager, leading to better staff retention, finally, you are making it easier for you to scale by making adding new people a more uniform, and therefore predictable process. Better training has a place in your business.

That's our show for today, thank you so much for listening. Tomorrow, join us for a discussion on documentation and contract management. In the meantime, check us out on the web at www.YourOperationsSolved.com, where you can join our newsletter, and opt to be notified of all our uploads. I will see you next time.