4 Ways to Improve Your Employee Training System

The most stressful part about starting a new job is often orientation and training. The first day, you follow someone around while they spout off all sorts of information. Clock in here, break room’s there and don’t forget to turn in your TPS reports. Meanwhile, all eyes are on the new kid, which is uncomfortable.

Orientation can drag on for weeks as you learn new roles and responsibilities. All you want is a normal workday, but instead you spend the first few weeks shadowing someone or strapped to a computer for training (or both). It can be difficult when an employee is needed elsewhere, and it’s understandable why training doesn’t always get top priority from employees or supervisors.

If you’re not using an automated Employee Training system, you may be able to ignore the problem—for awhile. But in reality, this creates serious risk in the workplace, both in terms of safety and quality.

How can companies ensure their training programs are effective? Here are 4 key strategies to focus on.

1. Choose Engaging Computer-Based Training

Many companies today require computer-based training as part of their orientation. And as anyone who’s used it can tell you, there’s a big difference between good and bad online training content. Look for courses that:

• Engage users with video, images and audio.
• Include real-world situations that actually apply to your employees.
• Incorporate review and testing.

These are all essential to effective Employee Training. Otherwise, many people will just click through to the end to get it over with.

2. Don’t Expect Employees to “Fit It In”

Part of the problem in getting workers to comply with training is that employers don’t make time for it, especially when we’re talking about training updates for existing employees. As a result, many managers constantly have to chase people down to get it done.

An easy solution is to let Employee Training software manage the process for you. Many Quality and Compliance Management solutions allow you to:

• Segment and assign training by role, department or facility.
• Send automatic email notifications so you don’t have to track employees down.
• Pull training reports on completed courses, training status and more

3. Link Training with Testing

Unless you test employees on training material, there’s no way to know if the training worked. Testing gives you a quantitative measure of training effectiveness, giving you hard data in terms of pass/fail grades, percentage scores or other methods.

Why is this important? It helps you pinpoint specific training gaps that need to be addressed, whether it means retraining an employee on a new work procedure or updated safety measures.

4. Incorporate Event-Driven Training

Training doesn’t end once orientation is over. It’s a continual process that comes into play in a variety of workplace situations. These include:

• Adverse Events: Your Employee Training system should allow you to link investigations to the training record for things like incidents and nonconformances. It’s another critical tool for addressing training gaps.
• Corrective Actions: When root cause analysis identifies insufficient or incomplete training as part of the problem, you want to be able to link training assignments directly from the corrective action request.
• Change Management: Executing operational change is a complex process that touches multiple areas of the business. When protocol changes, you need to make sure that change is reflected in your training program.
• Reporting: Visibility into training programs is key. Look for Reporting tools that give you access to the data, trends and key performance indicators to help improve your training strategies.

Your Employee Training system is the foundation of your company’s safety and quality management strategy. Because training is so critical, it’s clear that manual systems are not up to the task.

Your best bet is to use a Quality Management System that automates Employee Training so you can be sure you’re doing all you can to protect your workers and the business.