The #1 Strategy to Effectively Train a New Employee

Training a new employee is exciting and terrifying.

On one hand, you have more help! You can offload work and start getting more done towards building your dream business. You get to work ON your business, not IN it.

On the other, you could spend all this time and money training someone, and then they don’t work out.

And unless you have a system in place to ensure your employees are doing things the way you want them done, their chance of success working for you is significantly compromised.

Worse, you may end up both paying a new hire AND doing the work yourself.

You need to effectively train your new employees to avoid this.

Here’s the #1 strategy for training your team.

Train with systems

22% of companies* don’t have a formal onboarding system! And those that do, don’t often have a successful or thorough training process.

Instead, there’s lots of guesswork. The owner isn’t sure exactly what they want and how they want it to be done, so they can’t communicate what they need.

And the employee doesn’t know what to do and fills in the blanks with how they think things should be done, even if it has nothing to do with how the business operates.

This combination leads to frustration for owners and employees. It also leads to an inconsistent experience for your customers.

The biggest new hire failure is bringing people in and not fully training them.

To properly train your new employees, you need to have an effective training system.

Document your Systems

The difference between an effective training system, and not, is the documentation.

Write down everything you do in your business before bringing anyone on.

That means every task, process and procedure.

Yes, that sounds like a lot of work. And it is. And… it’s worth it.

By doing this, you document your systems. A documented system acts as instructions for a task or process.

This way, when you need to train a new employee, there is no guesswork. You know exactly what needs to be done, and you have written, clear instructions for the process.

Strengthen your training.

Training needs to include process AND purpose.

Show your team what you need accomplished and why your company believes this is the best way to do it.

This increases your employee’s motivation and the chances that they’ll stay with your business.

You can effectively train your new employees by weaving process and purpose into your systems.

What are your thoughts?

The work you do document your systems allows for a smooth training process for your first employee or your hundredth.

Employees will come and go, no matter what. The idea of training and losing an employee doesn’t have to cause dread anymore. Because if they leave, you have a system in place to bring on someone new— stress-free.

Researchers found that organizations with a strong training system improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%.**

What are your thoughts on training? I want to hear from you in the comments.

Talk to you there!