Every morning, Seth Godin's daily email is the first one I read. He helps me set the tone for how I want to show up that day and shines a light on new ways of thinking about the world.
And often, I feel like he's spying on me when I get his post on THE EXACT THING I WAS JUST WRITING ABOUT YESTERDAY. But he always has a slightly different emphasis... some part of the idea that I didn't quite see.
In today's post, he helped me put my finger on another key difference between building an Employee Training and an Operations Manual: The level of empathy required for the task.
When you're writing an Operations Manual for your business, you definitely do need some empathy for your reader, because you don't want to create something they'll never use. But you can usually assume they have context for the instructions they're about to read and often they've done the thing you're writing about (perhaps in a different way) at least a time or two.
But when you're creating Employee Training, you need to crank the empathy level up to 11.
The original "up to eleven" knobs in the 1984 film This Is Spinal Tap
Your trainee...
is new to your company culture
barely knows anyone
may not have ever done this exact job before
and most importantly...
wants SO badly to make a great first impression, but isn't quite sure what success looks like at YOUR company.
That's why you have to be so very thoughtful when you're creating an employee training. Because you're not just teaching them some steps in a process. You're creating an experience that will help them grow their confidence. Confidence to be successful at their job and to become an important part of your team and culture.
This means you have to...
be explicit about "obvious" things like how we communicate around here. (i.e., "We're super silly and casual behind-the-scenes, but please be formal and professional in your interactions with clients... no client-facing emojis please!")
be careful about how much information you're sharing at once. Humans have a limit to what they can learn in a single sitting. Better to go deep and give lots of observation and practice in one topic than to try to teach 52 things in a day.
be intentional about how they interact with the other humans in your business. Sending your new-hire to "do their training" at a computer all day ignores their very real need for relationship-building in their first weeks on the job. Yes, use software tools like Trainual to facilitate an easy and repeatable training experience, but be sure to also intentionally build the human touch-points that will help them feel at home in their new workplace.
Keep asking yourself how your trainees are feeling as you build your Employee Training and you'll be sure to build a more effective training that ultimately gets you more of what you want: A team of aligned, connected A-players.
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