Training for Your Employees? Start Here
If you don’t provide learning opportunities to your employees, prepare to be shocked—You’re missing a surefire opportunity to prevent staff turnover. Need proof?
A whopping 80 percent of employeesemployees call it quits if they don’t get high-quality training.
The good news? You're about to learn how to max out workplace coaching and keep your people from jumping ship.
1. Analyze Your Employees' Knowledge Gaps
You need to know where employees need support the most. Otherwise, you’ll burn through cash without getting tangible results. Solution?
Ask employees to self-evaluate their core responsibilities. That'll give you hard data to help them drive the company forward.
Here’s how:
- Flip open your laptop and create a google spreadsheet.
- Type in the employee’s key responsibilities.
- Share the spreadsheet with the employee. Have them self-score on a scale of 1–3.
Scale:
| Level | Definition |
|---|---|
| 1 | I need a lot of training and assistance. |
| 2 | I'm pretty good at this, but there's still room for improvement — I need some training and advice. |
| 3 | I'm doing the job like Larry Page — I don't need coaching. |
Check out this post from Voxco on how to conduct a thorough Skills Gap Analysis.
2. Introduce a Personal Development Fund
You know where employees need a hand, now you need to help them reach those goals. But, what’s the best way to do it? Introduce a personal development fund.
It’ll let your people spend a certain amount of money on improving hard and soft skillsets they can later put on a resume.
Here are a few ways they might use the funds:
- Signing up for an online course
- Hiring a mentor
- Setting up an XYZ workshop
- Buying informational books
When employees see you’re committed to their growth they’ll stay for the long haul and bring their full power to your organization.
3. Use Coaches Who Are High-Flyers in Your Industry
As a manager, you may not know the nitty-gritty details of each employee’s job. In fact, you don’t have to; you’re the glue that helps team members hit their goals. So, turn to A+ players and get them to share wisdom and pass on their skills.
They can do it regularly or just until performance spikes. In exchange, reward your rockstars with a bonus or extra time off.
A highly specialized and customized well-being solution is coaching. We've learned quite a bit about how to consistently deliver favorable coaching outcomes for all types of people in the million coaching sessions we've had with BetterUp members over the past year.
In contrast to other personal or professional relationships, coaching relationships are special. A coach encourages the coachee to present their entire selves to the coaching sessions because of their training and experience, which allows them to perceive the coachee holistically.
4. Stay on top of your employees' training
So far so good. You've created an improvement budget and introduced a little training. Time to slap an S on your chest and sit back, right? Wrong. You need to know the training is like Nutella for your team. Otherwise, you might as well throw money out the window.
Here’s how:
- Use an anonymous survey tool like Survey Monkey to evaluate employees' reactions to training.
- Get employees to re-evaluate their skills on the 1–3 scale one month after the training.
- Monitor KPIs (e.g., Did the email response rate increase? Is the number of output articles higher?).
- OK, what if things still go amiss? What if the training doesn’t yield fruit? Lather, rinse, repeat.
Maybe you miscalculated learning needs. Or maybe the training wasn’t long enough or robust enough to get employees up to speed. Just go back and think how you can improve upon it.
Max ROI on Training for Your Employees: Key Takeaway
Your employees are the future leaders of your company. When you invest in their growth they want to reciprocate and help your business reach true north.