Training New Employees for Long-Term Success

Bringing new employees into your small business is a big step, especially if you’ve been flying solo up until now. You want to be sure that they have everything they need to become a successful member of the team—not just in the short term, but for their entire tenure with your company.

As you’re training new employees, make sure you’re setting them up for long-term success by providing the right information, help, and guidance during those early days of employment.

Create Training Protocols

As a small business, you may not bring in new employees often, which means that when they do show up, training them is often chaotic! Instead of falling into that trap, take the time to create solid training protocols that will allow you to more effectively teach new employees what they need to know.

• Write out all the tasks the employee is expected to perform. This means everything from starting the coffee maker in the morning to handling complicated client accounts.
• Break down the tasks. Consider all of the skills needed to handle each task, then break them down accordingly so the employee knows what is expected of them.
• Decide which tasks are most important and therefore should be learned first. Combining some small, easy-to-learn tasks with bigger processes that might take longer can make it easier for employees to absorb everything they need to know.

Once you know what employees need to know, keep the information on hand! This will help ensure a smoother training process for future employees as well.

Provide Mentors

You might not have the ability to work one-on-one with every employee that comes through the door, but there may be someone on your staff who can work with each one. Offering a mentor to new employees gives them the chance to ask questions in a more comfortable environment—not to mention, it tells them exactly who to ask when they do have a problem.

Working with a mentor can also help make new employees more comfortable in the workplace and give them someone with whom they can connect more easily while they get to know the company at large.

Offer the Right Tools

Today’s technology offers the unprecedented opportunity to give employees all the information they need about their jobs and job responsibilities all in one easy place.

Take advantage of that technology to offer employee handbooks, any relevant images or safety goals, and other key information that will help your employees succeed on the job. Quick access to that information will make it easier for them to look it up no matter where they are or what they’re doing—and without feeling the pinch of embarrassment when they have to ask another employee how to accomplish a task.

Provide Feedback

When you bring in a new employee, you want to provide regular feedback concerning their performance—both the things that they need to improve and the things that they’re getting right.

Schedule regular feedback sessions that will allow you to praise employees for the things that they’re doing well and offer advice about areas where they might need improvement. As you continue to provide feedback, the employee can then adjust their performance and expectations, eventually becoming more successful at every aspect of the job.

Evaluate Your Training

Once you’ve had an employee move through the training process, give them a couple of weeks to settle in, then take the time to ask them about how they felt the training process went. Did they get the information they needed to accomplish their daily job tasks? Did they feel that the training process was lacking in any way? By working with your current trainees, you can develop better training protocols that will make training more effective for future employees.

If you want to offer the best possible benefits for those new employees on your team, contact us. We’ll help you provide the critical insurance that will allow them to meet their goals and provide you with the assurance that you’ve chosen the right coverage for all your employees.