Ground-Zero Training

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In some cases CEOs decide training is the only way they can gain the competitive advantage they want. At Cooperative Home Care Associates, a $4-million home-health-care company in the Bronx, N.Y., president Rick Surpin knows his company's sole product is the service its home health aides provide. To Surpin, that means the company should invest as much in training as it can afford. Similarly, the Tattered Cover Book Store, in Denver, wants to be known for friendly customer service. So the company puts all new employees through two weeks of training that includes topics such as body language and the best phrasing to use in answering customers' common questions.

In the end, then, all the CEOs who swear by training have the same bottom line: they train because they've decided they must to build the companies they want. In a world of increasingly fierce global competition, a world where many other countries have a better-trained work force, it is a lesson more entrepreneurs will be learning. Bill Nothdurft, author of a book called SchoolWorks, comparing the school-to-work transition in a number of countries, tells a story that sums up the attitude of overseas competitors. Nothdurft remembers being astonished when he interviewed the CEO of a tiny German company ("It really was not more than just a corner garage") and discovered the substantial investment the owner had made in employee training. When Nothdurft pressed him for the reason he spent so much on training, the German appeared confused. "He just sort of looked at me and blinked a couple of times and said, 'Well, what would the alternative be?' "

It's a good question.

When big companies offer training programs, they may lavish millions on everything from interactive computer education to specially equipped training facilities. But when small-company CEOs train, they know how to leverage their resources -- they have to. What follows are some common questions on how to set up training in a small company, and the answers smart CEOs have discovered.

1. My business doesn't have the time or money for a conventional in-house training program. how else can I train?
Formalize the "buddy system." Everybody knows the way training gets done in most small companies: an experienced hand shows a more recent hire new skills. The only trouble is, in a busy small business, it's always tempting to put off that kind of informal training until a less harried time -- which all too often never comes. The Print & Copy Factory avoids that problem by providing employees with checklists detailing specific skills they need to be promoted, and managers must check off the skills as they are learned. Since many of the skills -- such as running a wide variety of copy machines -- can be learned only from others, the system helps ensure that informal training occurs regularly.

Use books. They're the poor man's consultants. As a CEO, you have unique leverage -- if you recommend and give a book to your employees, chances are good that many will at least try to read it. There's probably no less expensive way to get started on an employee-education program -- particularly on a broad theme like quality improvement. For example, at Pro Fasteners, founder Steve Braccini launched the company's quality program in 1989 by giving a paperback copy of Philip Crosby's Quality Without Tears to everyone in his work force, which at that time numbered 30-odd people. The company, a distributor of industrial hardware based in San Jose, Calif., then followed up with two months of weekly discussion groups to review the book. After all that, Braccini guesses, as many as a quarter of his employees never read Quality Without Tears. But he doesn't mind. Through the discussion groups, even people who didn't do the reading became familiar with Crosby's basic concepts about quality. That gave ev-eryone in the company some common language and ideas. "The reason we were able to galvanize around that book is because it was simple," Braccini says. "Everybody could understand it."

The Print & Copy Factory also uses books and tapes to provide some of its training on an ongoing basis. The company keeps a lending library of books, tapes, and videos that cover topics ranging from selling to self-improvement. To ensure that employees really use the material they check out, the Print & Copy Factory has developed a simple form that asks employees to describe very briefly what they learned.

Try outside seminars and classes. Let's face it: not ev-eryone's a reader. At the Plumley Cos., CEO Mike Plumley spent a frustrating two years just trying to convey to his managers all the new ideas about continuous improvement of company operations that he was reading about. "I talked till I was blue in the face," he recalls. "I really wasn't getting anywhere." Plumley got much better results when he sent Larry Moore, his director of education, to a two-day seminar on continuous improvement; Moore then designed and taught a short class on the subject to all Plumley employees.

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