Create a Training Division to Keep Your Best People

As you may have experienced over the past few years, there is a significant shortage of skilled workers in almost every industry. Your ability to hire and more importantly keep great people will become a necessary component for longevity in business, regardless of your trade.

Quality employees love to progress. Not only to advance in their career but also to develop the skills and abilities needed to match that growth. Therefore, one of the most important retention tools is to provide regular employer funded training and development.

So, what should you provide?

In chatting with business owners about whether they should provide training for their teams, I often refer to: “it is not whether you should or should not, it is a question of what do you provide.”

So, the questions to ask are:

1)         What do I train my team in?

2)         How often should I do my training?

3)         Who should do / provide the training?

What do I train my team in?

When asking most business owners about how they would love their team to be working together, they often come back to me with, “it will be great if they just worked and jelled like a well-oiled machine or in some cases like a professional sporting team. When they are out in the field, they work together to win the game.”

Therefore, the skills required for the above to occur include both hard skills (technical ability) and soft skills (leadership, communication, understanding relationships, having a good relationship with others, etc.). What can you be responsible for in providing for your team?

How often should I do my training?

My question back to them is, “Well how often does a professional football team train in comparison to how much they play a game?”

Obviously, a professional football team trains several days per week AND they often practice the fundamentals over and over and repeatedly.

So…when is game day in business? The reality is every day is game day in business. Are you allowing your team to practice on the customer that you have worked so hard to get, or they are well-rehearsed so that when customer communication or contact occurs, they know exactly what to do in every conceivable situation.

When I first started in business a mentor of mine said, “Jon, don’t practice till you get it right, practice till you can’t get it wrong!”

That has stuck with me through the years and that is what I would suggest to every business owner, particularly in those skills that are critical to the success of your business.

I suggest that every week you allocate 1-hour with team players to practice any of the following:

• Handling new customer enquiries/sales.
• Managing difficult conversations/clients.
• Procedures that create consistency of product delivery.
• Greeting a customer/client.
• Client handover process.
• Scheduling.
• Estimating.

Mix up the training between on-site and off-site. Keep in mind that the operations team out on-site deal with different challenges to the administration and office team at the back end. However, they both rely on each other to succeed.

Who should do / provide the training?

Within the business, senior team players can pass on technical skills, knowledge and systems training to those less experienced. This also provides a growth path for more tenured employees.

Often there are external organisations that deliver soft skills training such as leadership and communication strategies. At PROTRADE United, we recognised a need for senior employees such as site supervisors, forepersons, office managers and other team leaders to be up skilled in these areas and created a customised leadership program for the trade & construction industry. This has helped hundreds of business owners get the critical support from internal leaders with implementation of key strategies and training other employees.

In the end there is no shortage of training resources available – in person and via video. It is up to you to implement a structure that works for your business.

So how much training is enough? Well…you can always do more and one thing we know is that the more you train the more you retain, and the more profitable you will be.

Written by Jon Mailer

CEO of PROTRADE United

Author of ‘Not Just a Tradie’