If you want to help your team learn better, there’s a few systems you could incorporate that might make it easy.
The first and one of the most obvious ones is the type of people you’re hiring. If you’re hiring people who have an academic preference, then the training that you do might reflect the same types of academia they’ve been going through in terms of format. So it might be worth understanding how they learn and what they’ve been most successful with.
What I found as a practical way to teach people is the “I, We, You” method. And that is where I will do something and then we do it together, and then they do it themselves. And the extra step, and a really good one, is having them train someone else. This does a couple of things. But one of the most important things it does is it protects your business with a little bit of depth of talent. And now if someone leaves, you don’t have to go through the I, We, You again, your team member can do it.
In terms of documentation and systems, it’s critical to keep it as simple as possible. I usually like to have it in Google, because we all use email, or most of us do. Google Drive is quite an easy to search for system. I keep a very simple protocol where we just mentioned SOP, for any system. It stands for standard operating procedure. And that way, if we’re looking for something, we can just type the thing and then SOP or just type SOP and it will pull up a list of every SOP in the business.
And we keep our SOPs so simple, that a school kid could go through it. It’s just bullet points of the steps you go through. And ideally, when you’re creating an SOP, or someone in your team is creating it, they test it by having someone else go through it, and then they make adjustments. And you’ll also share the SOP with anyone who’s doing that procedure, so that it can be a fluid document, and it can be updated as things get done.
If you’re buying courses or getting external supplements for training, then it’s good to have a training register, or at least a recurring reminder in your team meeting to check on the progress of that. And one thing that I used to do when I was running the Mercedes-Benz dealership is I used to ask my team members to summarize their training. So they would come to the meeting and I’d ask them to share with the rest of us what they’ve learned. And now I know they’re actually going through it and I understand what they’re learning from it and it’s cross-pollinating my entire team with the knowledge from that training.
See our products here
Leave a Reply