We moved into a new home not too long ago. On a walk around the neighborhood, I realized that my 8-year-old son didn’t understand where we lived. We were walking on a street we had been on just 15 minutes before and he confidently started galloping in the wrong direction. “It’s this way, Mommy!” So my sweet, stubborn child and I started to have a completely ridiculous conversation about where we lived.
I needed to do something.
So I decided that every day, on the drive home from school, I’d have him navigate us home. First, though, I needed to show him how to do it. I walked him through every turn, pointing out the landmarks along the way. He seemed like he 100% got it. He’s a very smart kid. I figured he’d nail it on the first try.
He did not.
The first time he navigated, it took him about 15 extra turns to get us home. That doesn’t sound like much, but believe me … when you keep showing up 1 turn away from your street and having to turn in the opposite direction, it gets a bit maddening.
It stayed maddening for a while. Slowly, he figured it out. But it took him an astonishing number of tries before he could get us home reliably with the minimum number of turns. If I’d just shown him the route a couple of times, supervised him once, then left him to get home on his own, I might never have seen him again!
So what does this have to do with your new hire training?
This is how so many of us train our employees. We list a bunch of “topics” and “tasks” we need to “train them on.” We show or usually tell them how to do them. We may do them with them once or twice. Then we leave them to their own devices.
But are they doing the tasks the way you want them done? Are they doing them in a way that represents your company and culture? (Do you even know what that is in the first place?!)
You guys. We focus our time and energy on the training content. We forget to think about how we’ll know when an employee knows how to do the task. We need to have some way of making sure that your trainees have learned what matters most.
That’s right - you need to think about assessing learning before you start delivering training. But how?
Maybe you’re just starting to create training plans for your business. Maybe you just don’t have the time to write a bunch of training guides right now. If so:
Decide what success looks like for your new-hire once they’re fully-trained - in detail.
Decide what specific skills they’ll need to demonstrate - and how many times you want them to demonstrate each correctly. That way, you can be confident that they will be successful when they use these skills for real.
Write the skills they need to demonstrate on a checklist.
Decide who is allowed to coach and “sign off” on each skill. Write their name at the top of the checklist so the new hire knows who to go to for help.
Hand it to your new employee on day 1, giving them the responsibility of getting everything checked off the list.
And voila! You don’t just have a checklist. You have a plan, which means that your new hire can take ownership of their own training. They know from day 1 what success looks like and what it will mean when they’ve been fully “trained”.
Of course, eventually, you’ll want to write down how to do everything. That way, you and your team won’t have to keep saying the same things over and over every time you train someone new. But you’d be amazed how far a simple checklist of assessments can streamline your process for training new employees - especially when you don’t have time to write a bunch of content. AND, since you only need to train on the things you’re assessing, you’ll already have a great outline for the training content you do need to create.
Don’t overthink it. Just create that checklist and go!