5 Ways to Effectively Re-train Employees
Sometimes employees don’t understand the way an organization does things the first time. Maybe it’s a new process or policy change that creates the need to re-train and talk to employees. In industries like banking, healthcare, and finance typically a change in law or response to a recent customer situation often leads to the need to re-train. We’ll discuss 5 effective ways to re-train your current and future employees.
It’s important to remember that re-training does not necessarily imply a punishment or a recovery measure for delinquent employees. Re-training involves education and skill improvement. Even though retraining may seem an unnecessary chore to experienced professionals, it is essential in order to remain both efficient in the workplace and competitive in the job market.
Defining the Job
When employees need to be taken out of their normal routine into a new job role, new policy, or structure, define it. Itemize the main points or duties of the new task or policy. Ideally you’ll have the new primary responsibilities lined out, but that is not always the case. You’ll need to manage your employee’s knowledge, skill, and ability to perform the new task or adhere to new policies while training.
Pro Tip: Build Assessment into Re-training Materials
With Poll Everywhere, you can plan ahead for knowledge checks and skill checks, by adding live polling slides to your PowerPoint or Keynote decks. Live polling allows you to ask questions in under a minute, and gather responses via trainees’ mobile phones, either by SMS text or by guiding them to your personal response page on the web. After that, you can instantly create reports, and share them with colleagues or upper management.
Here’s how it works:
Follow-up: Setting An Appointment
Once the trainings have come to an end, make sure to set a follow-up appointment with your employees 3-6 months out to see how they are doing with the new material or changes. A lot of times the need to re-train an employee comes from policy changes or changes in corporate structure. When bigger items like those listed arise, it’s important to get feedback once the changes have been implemented for a period of time. Setting the appointment on the calendar, from the beginning, makes it harder to delay a follow-up meeting.
Feedback
This is one of the most effective ways to re-train your employees. Unless management is open to feedback, training will come and go without information being retained. Make sure to talk to your employees about the information presented and if they have any feedback to either better new implementations in your workplace or about how the material was presented.
Pro Tip: Use the Anonymous Setting for Honest Feedback
Employees are much more likely to give authentic feedback when they have no reason to fear that their words will be used against them. Make any Poll Everywhere question anonymous with the Anonymous setting. Use it anytime you feel employees would be more likely to speak up under cover.
Community
Learning happens best in a community of coworkers who reinforce policies, skills, and protocols as they work together. Be sure to publicly uphold examples of good work in meetings and town halls, so that employees have an ongoing motivation to keep practicing what they’re learning and re-learning.
Communication
This seems like a no-brainer, but accurate communication is the biggest item on this list. Without being able to communicate the purpose, relevance, and value the training has to your employee, there won’t be a connection. Since all employees learn differently it’s important that you are utilizing appropriate communication styles based on whom you’re talking to. If there is a big policy change that affects the entire company, use a variety of methods by speaking with a background and having an interactive portion. Unless you are able to communicate changes effectively, re-training your employees will not be successful.
While re-training your employees is a necessary step in the corporate world, there are ways that will allow you to maximize your ROI when doing so. Take a look at these 5 steps and determine the course of action your business takes when deciding to retain employees on various necessary topics.
Eric Friedman is the Founder and CEO of eSkill Corporation, a leading provider of Web-based skill testing for pre-employment and training. The company’s founding vision was to create software that can customize a skills test to fit the knowledge requirements for any job position. Holder of an MBA from MITís Sloan School of Management and an undergraduate degree in Psychology from Brown University, Eric has helped launch five startups since 1992. With 20 years in the game, he is now sharing his vast experience on eSkill’s blog, while mentoring his team and constantly expanding his company.
This article is by Eric Friedman from blogging4jobs.com.
