How quickly can you get your new employee from hired to absolutely crushing it?
How many of your long-time employees are still highly engaged and performing at their peak?
How long do your top performers stay with your company? How many are about to leave?
If you have a problem in one or more of these areas (most of us do) or if you don’t know if you have a problem or not, then there is one tool you can use to transform the performance of your current employees (and your future employees too).
Corporate training.
Now that is a topic that is sure to create hours of white-knuckled page-turning excitement, right?
Before you and I both fall asleep. Here’s a great corporate training video from the fictional Veridian Dynamics. (If only all training videos could be 34 seconds.)
But corporate training is no laughing matter. Most of it is just plain terrible. You stick the word corporate on the front of anything, and most people would rather stick the sharp end of a paper clip into their eye than hear whatever you have to say next. And corporate training is the epitome.
At the mere mention of the phrase, I’m sure your mind is filled with mindless PowerPoints and compliance training, but let me relieve the tension and say that’s not corporate training.
Corporate training, when done right, can do wonders for the vitalization of re-vitalization. Training (let’s drop the word corporate from now on and lower all our stress levels) is one of the essential imperatives for scaling an organization and sustaining a high degree of success.
In this article, we will look at what training should be as I show you the five hallmarks of an effective training program.
There is no tool as effective as training for boosting long-term performance across an organization. An effective training program will onboard new employees faster, increase the productivity baseline across the organization, encourage new and veteran employees to challenge the status quo, embed visionary creativity deep in the organization’s ethos, and foster rapid information sharing up and down and left and right throughout the org chart.
Onboarding New Employees Faster
The impact of a robust employee training program can be seen even before an employee is hired. Job seekers are looking for organizations that will make them better. New skill development and challenging work are highly sought-after traits of an organization. For this reason, a hiring brand that boasts a robust training program will have a significant competitive edge even before the employee is hired. If you want to attract up-and-coming talent, training is the way to do it!
The benefits of an excellent training program only increase as new employees are hired. By taking the time to develop quality training around the core curriculum and the culture, values, and expected behaviors within the organization, you will not only increase the rate at which new employees get up to speed but also ensure a better team fit, higher engagement, and greater alignment with the organization’s goals. This is true both in companies and cause-based organizations.
As you are developing your core curriculum, here are two things you want to keep in mind.
Be the university
The gap between the output of the educational system and the needs of organizations across industries is growing. You can’t sit back and wait for schools to get their act together.
Instead, step back and look at the skills you need in new employees versus those you can teach. You can likely teach far more than you do already. And by increasing the number of skills you teach, you will:
- create more room to hire for cultural fit and contribution,
- make yourself available to newer, more affordable talent,
- make a compelling offer to give more value to potential job candidates,
- lower the threshold for a capable employee without reducing quality or productivity expectations, and
- increase the size of the pool of prospective job seekers.
Train on culture
You cannot put culture in someone. Employees either share your values, or they don’t. By being the university, you can focus your effort on finding great cultural fits. We must, however, be careful not to confuse cultural fit with “being like us.” By focusing on those few values and behaviors that are genuinely core, you can open your organization up to the new ideas and influences that will help shape a more competitive, creative, and effective organization in the future.
But hiring right is only half the equation, especially if you do it right. If you attract and recruit the “movers and shakers” that you need to ensure greater success in the future, you will have to invest in aligning them around your shared culture.
While you can put values into someone, you can most certainly call them out and hold people accountable to those values.
Up next
In parts two and three of this three-part series, we will continue to explore four additional ways to create a new training program or radically transform your existing training so you can build a truly brilliant organization.
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