Training employees
Table Of Contents
Introduction – Major Goal of Corporate Leadership
In a corporate organization, employees are employed to work together to achieve a common objective. Most of the times, business is the top interest of everybody in the organization. In order to achieve this common purpose, different aspects of the job are laid out for the sole purpose of facilitating the division of labour. Division of labour itself enhances efficiency, increases output and reduces worker’s stress and burnout.
The different aspects of a job may not be similar, and these may include sales department, marketing, promotion and advertisement, human resource management, etc. These all need to be run effectively because they form the core of the business engine.
However, let’s peep back a little, to such a time when you as the manager of the business organization was all by yourself. You were the sum of everything put together. Maybe you are at this stage in your business now, but there is one major goal of corporate business leadership – to replicate yourself in many different people so that you don’t necessarily have to be around always for the job to be done.
But as sweet as that may sound, it is not that easy to achieve. You need a lot of resources and time to get the desired workers base. And even more importantly, ‘great employees’ are very scarce. You hardly find them and when you do, they may not want to stay long with you. And here comes the challenges in employee training.
Major Challenges in Employee Training
When you’ve managed to secure a good employer base, or you probably have a few hands working with you, you may want to begin training those employees to work just the way you want them to. But there are also some major challenges associated with employee training as follows
- Lack of commitment
- Employee migration to another job
- The time required for training
- Unsatisfaction with work
- Disloyalty
Lack of Commitment
You may have found the qualified people for the job, both in terms of skill qualification and hands-on experience. But if they are not committed to developing the firm, there is nothing much you can do. Great employees that put their best into the work are those that have taken the growth of the company as their own growth. They want to leave their mark with you so that even when they leave, you can trace good progress back to them. This too has its great rewards.
Employee Migration to Another Job
One of the greatest fears of the employer is losing the best employees he has trained, but this is inevitable. When employees accept the employment letter, they sign up for two or three things;
- To earn some money for the time being
- To learn on the job until they are ready to move
- To learn skills that will enable them to start their own
Only very few (less than 0.1% – #unverifiedstats) would want to remain in the same job all their life. The challenge in this is that, you train your employees to be as excellent as you or even better, only to watch them leave you happy. It’s a great feeling to be looked up to as a teacher and mentor, but this can be a major challenge in employee training.
The Time Required for Training
Whether you like it or not, it is not going to be a day’s ride as far as training your workers is concerned. You are going to have to wait patiently until they fully grasp the concepts and gathered the necessary skills. This may not be much of a problem if a few months would be sufficient, but it may require years of training and re-training.
Unsatisfaction With Work
When a worker is not satisfied with the job, there is absolutely nothing else you can do than get him interested or send him away. But aside from the consequences of their satisfaction to your business, it also affects how much they learn. Unsatisfaction can result from many things, some of which I will touch further in the upcoming sections.
Disloyalty
Some employees are inherently disloyal. It’s just their framework to be disloyal and disrespectful. They could do anything negative to your business if they are going to gain from it. It should be every employer’s duty to fish out disloyal employees and send them packing before they cause you crumbling to the ground.
Even though these challenges abound, it is still important that you train your employees right. Train them to become their best, even if they would end up leaving you. When you are a true mentor to your employees, they are better motivated to work for you, to put their best to the job and even when they leave, they would still remember you for it.
Let’s see the advantages of training your employees the right way.
Advantages of Training Employees Right
- You can have time for rest and leisure: When your employees are trained to do the job perfectly, you can have rest of mind when you are away from work. You can afford to go on vacations, trips, and other activities that captivate you.
- You can afford to do other things: If you are multi-investor, training your employees well enough to seamlessly replace your duties can give you time to enter other investment platforms and harness new opportunities while your current business is running smoothly without you.
- Increased output and productivity: The better word is ‘efficiency’. When you have capable hands to the job, your own job as the manager becomes reduced. With a reduced workload on you, you can think better and had a clearer head to plan for your business.
- Leadership satisfaction derived: To some, this won’t matter much but there is really a form of satisfaction derived when you see that you are effective at carrying everybody along. That’s what leadership does and it gives a sense of satisfaction and joy.
At this point, I have a short African story to tell before I continue. You can skip to the strategies… if you don’t want any story yet.
A man had two children, a boy and a girl, who were loved fondly by both their parents. Their mother, Uliha, was a deeply, dark-skinned African lady, a lovely and cheerful woman with no moments of boredom around her. But on some occasions, her face would dim out with cloudiness and gloom as though all her smiles had been stolen. Those beautiful African facial markings soon looked like she was wearing a masquerade mask.
But those scary appearances are induced by the sheer burning rays of the sun hitting her back as she works on her small tomato farm. She effortlessly tills large portions of land without giving a smile. It is as though, she suddenly has no more time for smiles and frivolities. Work first…
But then, she is not alone. Her two children and their father would have to choose who would be with her on the farm. But that wasn’t difficult at all. The daughter customarily, went with her to the farm while the young man stays with the father in his carpentry workshop.
The little, observant young lady had also noticed her mother’s characteristic wrinkled face while she worked. Then, she suddenly threw the question at her mother, “Mama, did anyone offend you?” The mother looked up and smiled at her and didn’t utter a word.
But that was not where her observations ended. The young girl also noticed how her mother meticulously tilled the ground and selectively placed a few seeds into the hole. The precision, the dexterity, and determination with which the mother picks the seeds and accurately drops five seeds into a hole was amazing. The youngster couldn’t help but explore her fascinations. And shortly after, she was already planting like her mother.
Let’s admit the truth here. No doubt the work was difficult for the girl’s mother without a helping hand, but no matter how difficult it was for her, she just preferred to do it anyway until there is someone (her daughter, hopefully) that can do it the way she wants, without fear of ruining.
Strategies to Properly Train Your Employees to Work Like You
- Encourage active participation
- Give incentives and good wages/salary
- Understand leadership
- Reward their success
- Correct them in love
- Ignore subtle errors
- Teach them the basics of how things are done
- Be patient, give them time
- Build their trust for you
Encourage Active Participation
One sure strategy to train your employees to work well is to encourage active participation among them. It is not enough what they know, what counts is what they do. There are many ways to spur interests among your trainees. But one easy, yet inexpensive way of doing so is making them feel important in their contributions. Workers get so discouraged when you make jest of their inputs, or when you mock their questions and/or answers. You should encourage them to watch, learn and be actively involved.
Give Incentives and Good Wages/salary
When employees are given incentives, paid duly and given some great, though seemingly small packages, they are encouraged to work more. They feel happy coming to the workplace every morning and that enhances how much they learn to do the job the way you want them to.
Understand Leadership
Leadership is a broad term here. I have some more things to talk about leadership later in this post. However, good leadership gives you a level of influence over your employees, to make them do their work the way you want them to.
Reward Their Success and Loyalty
Inasmuch as you point out their failures and shortcomings sometimes, you should also reward their success and loyalty too. When you reward them when they do well, it motivates them to do better. In the overall, they get better at what you want them to do for the organization.
Sometimes, when they do something close to being successful, even if it’s not exactly what you desired, you should still motivate them with your response. It doesn’t always have to be a show of dissatisfaction.
Ignore Subtle Errors
As you allow free participation in the organization, your employees are bound to make little errors sometimes. Confidence is one basic requirement for enhanced skills and productivity. You should learn to ignore subtle errors in their quest to try out what they have learned so far. Your only precaution here is that you should be careful enough not to try out things that would cause great damage to the organization, or at least let them try out such things under supervision.
Correct Them in Love
Love here does not mean so much as you would otherwise think. It simply means creating a balance between scolding for wrongs and commending for rights. When they know that you genuinely correct them to make them better and to minimize errors, they are more likely to learn faster and also to stay longer in your company. In summary, you must learn to draw them back to you after scolding.
Teach Them The Basis of How Things Are Done
Sometimes, your employees would not know exactly why you are angry at them. Yes, it happens to everyone. It is very important that you teach your trainees and employees how and why things should be done the way you want them to. That way they get to learn to wholly understand the concepts and never to deviate from them.
The issue here is that most bosses or employers hold on too much to their knowledge, such that they are willing to impact some of them into their employees. But this needs to be discouraged because you deny them the opportunity to be like you or get better. In the long run, this will increase your overall burden with no capable hands to work like you.
Be Patient, Give Them Time
They say Rome was not built in a day. Similarly, great skills are not acquired in just one day, it takes time. If you want your employees to do the job(s) like you, you should also realize that it may take them a long time before they fully perform the duties the way you’d want them to. Just be patient.
Build Their Trust in You
The big question here is, how do you build their trust in you? There are many ways to make them believe in you and mentor their learning after you, but these are embedded in two things;
- Competence
- Character
When your employees see that you are competent at what you do, they are more inclined to believe in you. However, no matter how competent you already are, everyone still has what they don’t know yet. But the way around it is that you must first show your confidence so that your trainees and employees will, in turn, have confidence and trust in you.
Solving The Leadership Problem
“Understanding leadership” was one of the strategies I discussed above. Recall that I promised I was going to talk more on leadership at a later time. Here, we are going to scratch a little about leadership and how it affects employee training.
John C. Maxwell simply defined “Leadership” as “influence”. This is arguably one of the simplest, yet most all-encompassing definitions of leadership.
Steven Covey also demonstrated in his book, The Seven Secrets of Highly Effective People, that you can enlarge your circle of influence by building relationships and impacting those in your sphere of influence.
Effective leadership is often a mix of tolerance and action. Whereas one hand draws them in love, the other hand may scold.
In order to train your employees to work efficiently and also to do the job almost exactly the way you do, you must develop ways to lead effectively too. Modern leadership is no more about force and coercive means, in short, this may discourage your workers from being the best you want them to be.
When you are a mentor/leader to someone working for you, they pattern their skills with yours and they simply become multiple replicas of yourself. That way, you know that with or without you, the job will be well done and just the way you want it.
You can be a leader to your employees or trainees and then, they will not easily forget your impact in them throughout their lifetime. Being a boss will only work based on contract but being a leader and mentor will work across all bounds.
Conclusion
Conclusively, in training your workers to work as you, there is really so much you need to do. The strategies include encouraging active participation, regarding efforts, correcting in love, teach them well enough and then, be patient because it may take some time.
In all, we now know that the major goal of corporate leadership is to train employees, trainees, to be like you, do the job the way you want them to and completely fill the void you create when you are absent. That’s the manager’s dream.
Please, drop some comments below. It could be helpful.
Nice piece but the name of the author is not mentioned.
Thanks for the observation.