Build a career track. Like Unitech, many small companies that become interested in training keep adding new components to their training programs. Over the long haul, this approach can lead to an integrated training program that grows with the company. Nowhere is that clearer than at the Print & Copy Factory. President Ray Tom, who founded the company in 1976, says he started training as soon as he began hiring people. Now the Print & Copy Factory reports $8 million in sales and has 180 employees -- as well as a highly organized training program.
In most companies, operating a copy machine is a dead-end job. But at the Print & Copy Factory, Tom has over the years organized five grade levels of machine operators, with gradually increasing pay and skills in areas like copy-machine maintenance. Upon joining the company, each new employee is told about the different levels and given a checklist detailing the skills required to move up, along with a list of all the training sessions available in the company. Some training is required, but much is optional. Most classes are scheduled as needed; if only one employee needs to learn a skill, it is taught one-on-one. In a number of subjects, the company has run a session once and made a video that subsequent employees can watch to learn.
When employees are ready, they can take the various skills tests, which include a combination of written questions and on-the-job tasks, to move up a level. The result? Since much of the training is sought by motivated employees, rather than forced on all workers, the Print & Copy Factory minimizes wasted resources. This method also allows the company to provide a great deal of training in a flexible manner. The company is so happy with its six-year-old career track for machine operators that it is now creating similar programs for other areas of the company, such as administration and customer service.
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2. I want to start an in-house training program, but I'm a businessperson, not an educator. How do I teach? What should the classes be like?
Keep it useful; if you're not sure what employees want to know, ask. The first time the Plumley Cos. taught a short course in rubber technology, the company used a curriculum developed by a university. It bombed. Steve Cherry, Plumley's manager of technical services, remembers looking out at the blank faces of the company's production workers as he was drawing carbon molecules on the board. "They kind of sat here like, 'That's nice -- and when do I get out of here?' " he recalls ruefully. "It just went over their heads." Cherry quickly found out his coworkers needed specific, practical information about the things that affected their jobs, such as, Why does this compound run and this one not run? Today he starts the rubber-technology course by asking employees to write down what they want to know about the products they make -- and he organizes his classes around the most commonly asked questions.
Keep it hands on, active, and lively. Most of the entry-level employees at Cooperative Home Care have an eighth-grade reading level or less, according to president Rick Surpin. "Most of them hated school," he says. "The worst kind of training for the folks we work with is to sit them in classrooms and make them listen to lectures, but that's what people do." So Cooperative Home Care tries to cover most topics in its preemployment training through hands-on demonstrations accompanied by an explanation. Employees will often be asked to discuss a real-life situation, such as how to deal with a difficult patient. They then break into small groups to come up with solutions. By law, home-health-care courses must be supervised by nurses, but Cooperative Home Care adds assistants who have themselves been home health aides. That way, new employees can better relate to the trainers.
Make general ideas practical by using examples from your company. Larry Moore has been teaching continuous-improvement techniques to all workers at the Plumley Cos. That could be a general subject -- but not in Moore's class. Because the company wants its employees to learn team problem solving, they spend much of the class working in groups. And to emphasize how the theory of continuous improvement relates to the Plumley Cos., Moore shows a brief videotape he has made of some process in the plant. After watching the video, employees form groups. Then each group must come up with four suggestions for improving that particular process. (In general, Moore is a big fan of using homemade videos to make his points. "If you're in education and training and you don't have a camcorder, you're missing the boat," he says. Moore, like his counterparts at the Print & Copy Factory, has begun videotaping training sessions. He sends the tapes to out-of-state Plumley branches.)
Give on-the-job assignments and tests. At the Delstar Group, a Scottsdale, Ariz., retailer, training director Carol Gleason will spend a session in her classes for new supervisors discussing a series of management techniques for a particular situation, such as dealing with a subordinate who has some type of performance problem. As "homework," the supervisors try out the techniques in their stores and then start the next class with a discussion of the results. That way, Gleason says, the supervisors can begin learning not just from her but from one another.
Similarly, at the Tattered Cover Book Store, new employees complete work sheets to ensure that they are learning -- but the work sheets involve exercises like locating specific titles and subjects in the store. At the Print & Copy Factory, the tests employees must take for promotions are as practical as they get: in one test, machine operators have to demonstrate their ability to clear a jammed copy machine.
