Adequate training is essential to employee satisfaction and retention. Here are a few suggestions to help you re-evaluate your employee training.
You wouldn’t hand the keys over to a new CEO without giving them at least a basic idea of what his responsibilities are, would you? The same thing goes for any and all positions, even those on the bottom rung of your organization.
Similarly, have you ever fallen into the trap of merely training a new employee immediately, then leave them to their tasks — including new ones assigned to them along the way — without any further instruction?
This is something that plagues many businesses in the janitorial industry, simply because many don’t know exactly how much — or how often — they need to train their employees. Telling them, “do this,” or “don’t do that,” is all well and good, but it doesn’t really empower your workforce to succeed in the long-term.
In my personal experience, there’s a particular employer I had that didn’t really have a system or process in place for training me in my marketing role with the organization. Oh, I was told about my tasks and how to do them, but I never really felt that I had been sufficiently trained on how to actually use the product that my company was selling. As a result, even though I could fulfill my responsibilities for that specific position, I didn’t have much room for growth in the company because I was nearly useless at using the actual product. I wasn’t truly empowered to excel in the long-term with that organization.
In combining my own experiences with various tips found by others in the janitorial industry, here are a few questions to consider when looking at the processes you have in place for training your workforce:
- What are the short-term and long-term benefits of training your employees?
- Do you care more about churning out employees like a factory, or should you put more time and care into helping each individual employee grow in their position?
- Should you train your employee on everything right up front (and then leave them to do their job), or should you “re-train” your entire workforce periodically (and offer new tips/tricks to make their jobs easier)?
I know that some of the answers to these questions above seem, at least on the surface, inefficient or time-consuming, but there’s a reason why I don’t think it’s a bad thing when training employees takes longer than 30 minutes. If you give your employees the time and care they need to fully understand their tasks, and the importance of those tasks within the organization, you are empowering them sufficiently so that they can increase their productivity and efficiency in cleaning your facilities.