Rochambeau Continued

Here is the second part of yesterday’s post. Hope it’s helpful!   

3)     Let your employees see how they really look. Have you ever given a speech or performance, and then watched a recording later, only to be shocked at how you looked? I personally have a tell-tale “you don’t know what you’re talking about” expression that I make without even knowing.  It’s been pointed out to me several times, but until I actually recorded it on SureSpeak and saw it, I didn’t realize what a jerk I can be. Not that your employees are jerks…but some of them certainly have gestures and expressions that don’t convey what they are trying to get across.  Let employees notice their own flaws first.

4)      Allow senior employees to mentor junior employees without taking time away from their duties. This is one of the best universal training methods…if it can be done in a way that maximizes the time of both employees. Well, if the new employee could record their sales presentation to have a senior employee later review and score it, wouldn’t that be great? No one’s day is interrupted, and the senior employee might just remember a few things they have forgotten since their own new hire training.

5)      Simple. Practice makes perfect.  Cliché…yes. But clichés are clichés for a reason. Good athletes practice more than bad athletes. Why wouldn’t the same be true for communication?

 

So, when you look at your company’s bottom line and see how much you’re spending in training, how long it’s taking employees to get fully ramped up and how much you’re losing in turnover, is it a number with which you’re ok? Or could it use some improvement? Go ahead and throw out a couple hands of rock-paper-scissors to decide. If it’s not a number you like, contact us at info@surespeak.com.

 

Rochambeau: Good for playgrounds. Not so good for corporate decision making…

Don’t get me wrong– along with Scrabble, Sudoku and Trivial Pursuit, it’s one of my favorite games ever. But you shouldn’t let chance influence business decisions. How much money are you spending per year on training? The average training program is said to cost a company anywhere from 5-10% of a company’s payroll (trainingzone.com).  You spend this money, taking a chance that these employees will not only retain the material and make you money, but stick with your organization. How much can you decrease your spending by simply making the program more efficient? Here are some ways SureSpeak can do just that for your company (this is rather long, so we are going to split this up over the next few days—so check back!):

1)      Let your training staff work on development, not repetition. If your corporate trainer had to listen to every single new employee go through training materials, how long do you think it would take? It would be ideal though, right? Well, your training department can now set aside an hour a day to listen to several sales presentations, customer service calls or duck hunt voiceovers…whatever business you’re in. Allowing your trainers to dedicate this time, review all in one session and do so with little interruption. This will allow your trainers to address training problems new hires are facing and improve material. What are the chances of that happening with 20 new hires in the room?

2)     Make role play effective. Role play is powerful only if both people are engaged, which is difficult to address in face-to-face training. On one hand, you want your strong trainees to work with the weaker, in the hopes the weaker pick up habits of the stronger. Well, that’s a two way street. You’re doing the stronger employee no service by having them train with a weaker employee. In fact, you’re un-training them. The stronger employee will pick up bad habits. They won’t have their own shortcomings addressed. In fact, they may begin to resent the trainer (and your company) for doing the company’s dirty work. None of this will happen if you engage in webcam based role play, and have your training staff do the reviewing.

 

Check back tomorrow for the rest of this post!