In fact, Henry Ford famously stated,” The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.”
This quote encapsulates the importance of training and why it is crucial for any business to be successful.
No one wants to read about processes that are outdated or even obsolete. It wastes everyone’s time and is mostly useless for your workers.
Read on as we explore strategies you can use to keep your internal training fresh and introduce you to Express Writers University. This is our new internal training site that we will use to make sure our writers always have the most up-to-date resources and skills.
Why Is Internal Training Important?
Whether you have two employees or two thousand, they need proper training to do their job effectively. Your business should have training available for roles from entry-level positions to high-level executives. Even having materials for those who train your employees is important.
Developing effective training materials achieves several goals:
- Demonstrates and Defines Roles and Responsibilities
While your new team members likely have a general idea of their responsibilities, you can’t ignore training them on in-house best practices. This training should clearly define your expectations for them and include real-world examples and demonstrations of their responsibilities.
If they ever have any questions about their role and responsibilities, they should be able to refer to the training materials for clarification. You may need to consider updating your materials if you regularly hear from new hires that they can’t find the answers they need in your training guides.
- Establishes Best Practices
Even if employees have experience in your industry, your company likely has some unique processes they need to learn. Effective training content should exemplify the best practices for your business.
When employees know your expectations and have the best methods to achieve the goals you set, they will catch on faster. Plus, you’ll avoid having to slow down your tasks and spend time teaching someone a new way to do things.
- Improves Employee Compliance
If employees don’t get the proper training to understand your expectations, how can you expect them to comply with your procedures and rules? When your training content clearly defines your business rules and practices, your employee compliance should improve.
It’s worth noting that the material should also outline any consequences if employees ignore the rules. You clearly establish boundaries and ensure they understand what could happen before they make a mistake.
- Enhances Employee Performance and Satisfaction
When your employees understand their roles and how to do their jobs, you should see a boost in employee performance. In turn, when employees feel confident and secure in their roles, which can improve employee satisfaction.
If you create an environment that nurtures satisfied employees, you’re likely to notice lower turnover rates, less absenteeism, and more pride in the work they do.
- Provides Opportunities for Advancement
Training new employees is something all businesses do. But do you offer training opportunities for your veteran employees?
Internal training is an excellent way to give your loyal employees the skills they need to advance within your company. This is often called upskilling and helps increase employee retention, prepare employees for promotions, build on their current skills, and keep your business up-to-date on the latest industry trends.
Types of Training Content
You can produce training content in a wide range of formats. Some of the most common types of training materials include:
- Videos: Videos are an excellent source of training, especially if you need to demonstrate a specific activity or process.
- Checklists: You can give new employees checklists during their training to ensure they accomplish all their onboarding tasks.
- Presentations: Slide presentations are a great way to cover general topics.
- Worksheets or evaluations: Worksheets help employees practice their new skills, and evaluations let them prove their competency.
- Activities: For many employees, there is no better way to learn how to do something than by doing it yourself. Make sure your trainers follow specific procedures for any active, hands-on training to create consistency for all new employees.
How to Improve Your Internal Training Content
Whether your training materials are outdated, incomplete, or not applicable to your business, you should reevaluate them to keep your training relevant and helpful. Try these 4 strategies to improve your internal training content.
- Reflect Your Business Practices
While generic “off-the-shelf” training materials are available online, these may not be the best fit for your business. By creating your own custom training content, you can incorporate your unique business practices into your training. This enables you to include real-world examples and data that directly correlate to what employees can expect to happen.
As your business practices evolve, you can update your training to include these changes. For example, if you replace one software solution with another, you should update your training to include the new program. There is no point in training someone on procedures you no longer use.
Using custom, up-to-date training materials can make onboarding easier for new hires. They can see exactly how to do their daily tasks instead of having to figure it out on their own.
- Use Staff Feedback
An incredible resource for your training materials is your own staff. These are the people who use the training materials. If there is a major disconnect between the training procedures and the actual on-the-job experience, consider updating your training content.
To prevent a disconnect from happening, you should regularly ask for feedback from your employees. Once they have completed their training and gotten experience in their new job, ask them if there was anything they were still unsure about or if anything was confusing or misleading.
You should also ask for feedback as soon as someone has completed a training course. Consider questions like:
- Was the training content helpful?
- Was the training relevant to your role?
- Were there any topics covered in the training that you still do not understand?
- Are you satisfied with the training content?
- Was the material easy to read/understand?
- Is there anything you think should be added to this training program?
- Do you feel you can confidently fulfill the requirements of your job after taking this training?
- Do you have any suggestions to improve the training materials?
If your training content is online, consider adding an automated survey that trainees fill out to complete the training. The results can be automatically tabulated and sent to the appropriate team for evaluation.
Including a test at the end of each module is another way to assess the quality of your training. If trainees routinely fail or get low scores on the test, the training materials are likely inadequate.
Continually monitoring and improving your training helps your staff be better at their job and shows them that you care about their feedback.
- Consider Your Company Goals
Does your company have the same exact goals year after year or even quarter after quarter? We’re guessing the answer is no. Most companies regularly evaluate and adjust their goals based on current and past performance. As you update company-wide goals, you’ll want to make sure that all training content reflects those goals as well.
For example, let’s say your company extensively relied on automated customer service responses but realized your customers were feeling disconnected. Now, you are cutting back on automation to focus on a more personalized approach. If your training materials still include information about the old, automated processes, any new employees who join could feel confused while trying to catch up.
- Review Your Training Content Regularly
One of the most critical steps in creating your training content is to plan to review it regularly. Assign this to a relevant associate who can go through each piece of training you have to make sure it is still current and useful.
Depending on the amount of training materials you have, this could be a large-scale effort. You may have one associate or a team whose job focuses on updating the training content as processes change. However, it is still important to schedule a time to do a more thorough review and update of the content. Depending on how quickly your business changes, this could be every two to three years or even every two to three months.
Small changes throughout the year can help your internal training stay relevant and fresh. If there are associates who must retake training sessions regularly, these updates can help them from getting bored with the content and ensure they always learn from the most up-to-date information.
With in-depth, updated training content, your team should have the knowledge and skills they need to do their jobs well.
What Is Express Writers University?
Express Writers University is a new site we’ve started for both new and current writers and editors. With this new training, we hope to create a smoother, more efficient onboarding process while offering more high-level learning opportunities for writers who want to advance their skills. All our training lessons will include an evaluation to make it easier to track who has completed and passed each module.
In Express Writers University, our writers and editors will receive training for our unique business procedures, learn how to write and submit assignments, and explore deep dives into specific writing topics that can help improve their writing. These topics include things like:
- Passive vs. active voice
- SEO keyword research
- Creating better social media posts
- Avoiding fluff language
- How to source images
- Writing high-performing emails
- Comma usage
- Formatting guidelines
With Express Writers University we hope to achieve the following goals:
- Make onboarding easier for new hires that is less cumbersome for management
- Better prepared new hires
- Improve copy quality through assigned lessons based on editor feedback
- More accurate tracking of completed training
- Growth opportunities for existing writers and editors
- Improve retention and satisfaction for current team members
Why We Are Updating Our Training
We’ve found that our previous training process could be too cumbersome for many of our writers. We were losing qualified writers during the onboarding process because it was too slow, and there were too many separate documents to read.
In addition, we did not have a process to verify if someone had actually read through the required materials. This was evident after some new writers submitted their first assignments without following internal guidelines.
With our new training content, we hope to solve all these issues. Our new onboarding process will be smoother and more effective in tracking new writers’ process through all required reading. Additionally, each writer must pass our new evaluation process before they receive their first writing assignment.
The system also makes it easier to work with current writers who want to learn new skills and improve their writing. They can take new modules to learn other writing types and receive an evaluation. If they pass the evaluation, we know they are qualified to move on to more advanced writing assignments.
Finally, we are making it easier for our editors to assign refresher courses to improve their skills. If our team feels they need to brush up on a specific grammatical convention or go over an internal brand. They will be required to complete an assessment at the end of the lesson.
How Will Express Writers University Affect Your Content?
When you request content from us, you have certain expectations. You want high-quality, well-researched, error-free content that follows your brand guidelines. With these updated training materials, our team becomes better equipped to achieve our goal of “Quality content done right the first time.”
Every piece of content we offer includes two free revision requests. While our current revision request rate is relatively low, we hope to reduce that number even further with better-trained writers and editors.
With our improved internal training content, you can expect even better results from our expert writers and editors.
Our Internal Training Content Gives You Better Results
As a client, you want to make sure you get the best results possible from your business partners. With our new Express Writers University training content, our writers at each of our levels will have access to our latest training materials. This will help them become familiar with our processes and expectations while expanding learning new skills.
If you are considering using our writing services, you can feel confident that our professional expert writers have the training they need to meet or exceed your content expectations.
Want to learn more about the content services available at Express Writers? Contact us today to start a conversation.