If you are anything like me, you just don’t have time for preparing training materials. Action items such as making a syllabus, creating lessons for new members, setting up lunch and learns, and teaching new people your company way can be difficult to coordinate. Here are three tricks that we have learned over the last two years that are paying off in spades.
- Assign it. Someone must own training. Dynamic Edge needs new people to be trained quickly and efficiently. Last year it hit us: training was a reaction to a new person getting hired. Since then, we have made tremendous strides in the rest of our services to make them proactive while training just sat there as a reaction. We have two weeks to prepare for the new member to start, and it still seemed like a surprise every time. Here’s what we did to address this: made someone own it. We now have a DynEducator who maintains our training materials and is always ready for a new DynEdger to start. We even keep a couple of welcome packets all made up and ready to go.
- Document as you go. Create the plan for next time. Often we have to blaze a new path. Especially when you work in technology. So how do you keep your training up to date? You develop it as you go. Here’s an example: we have a new position that required leadership training. A few of us brain stormed and talked to other business owners. We identified two books that we wanted to incorporate into the training and put together a very high level plan. Then we documented our meeting discussions and created a syllabus for next time. This way the next person that needs training, we can follow the plan and we won’t have to reinvent the wheel. This leads to more consistent training, which leads us to the next point.
- Video. Consistency is key. We learned early on that if we wanted our customers to have a great experience we needed specific processes and discipline. It seemed like we forgot this when it came to training. Today, our entire 60 day training process is done by video, check lists and tests. We even had all of our team members go back through and get consistently trained. This has led to a much higher understanding of our goals, our core processes and our direction as an organization. If you don’t have the tools to create your own training or would like our help to get you started, contact Lisamarie, and she will be happy to share our processes with you.
There you have it, the secret sauce that is making training work in our organization. We have the numbers to show an increase of over 4% in customer satisfaction and a decrease in issue resolution time.
These three simple tricks are allowing us to beat our competition hands down. By this time next month, our entire team will have achieved HIPAA certification. Not a single other computer support company out there has accomplished this.
~ Bruce
