Time to Train

Small Biz Book – Post #7

I’ve experienced working for many different types of businesses and played vastly different roles among them. As I said in the introduction to this blogged book, my past and current participations have made me 99% sure that I didn’t want to run my own business, and, instead, simply write about them. (I’ll admit to considering opening a male version of Twin Peaks for my single & newly divorced chicas out there as well as running an Airbnb, but I was only 1% convinced, so how could I?)

The current, concerning situations businesses are experiencing have re-sparked my contemplation on operations in general. There’s only so much time I can spend watching movies & meditating before my mind insists on time to simply ponder.

My employer at the time of this writing, a Fortune 500 company, deemed an Essential Business, has continued forth with production. However, layoffs & furloughs & severance packages could still not be avoided over the past few weeks. With so many of our customers placing their accounts on hold, we simply didn’t have enough work for everyone on staff. Therefore, I realize the topic of Training may not be the subject on anyone’s mind, outside of my lil’ spaghetti head, but that surely won’t always be the case.

It would be fair to say that, unsurprisingly, jobs based on time spent on the clock, expected the least amount of original thinking out of me. My first boss at Dairy Queen, after having watched me craft a beautiful vanilla cone, quickly weighed my art. It was some absurd amount over the allowed franchise weight. This experience played on repeat many times as I worked at various restaurants and stores along my path (i.e. Target, Kroger, etc.). Bringing a new idea to the table, even if it would better the process, was not a respected gesture.

Sadly enough, teaching, a career that cultivated my creative spirit in the beginning years, also morphed into a factory-type setting. Every teacher of the same grade was to rotely read and follow the teacher’s manual at the exact same time each day. It killed my soul that the moth that Lucy brought in – the one everyone was ape shit to discuss Right Now – had to wait until “Science Time” in the afternoon, if there was time after the lesson. Opportunities for me to extend my learning as an educator were mandatory instead of chosen, and, more often than not, led by a sales team rather than proven, successful teachers.

As an exact contrast to the above experiences, I have also been given free reign, as in: we have been throwing all of our files in this box and have no established SOPs in writing, so feel free to hap at it. While this was extremely fun for my artistic side, I had no official training in business and was winging the reports I created, based equally on ease and esthetics.

I’ve also been released to complete my duties with no actual training. I believe the exact method in place was: jump in and try it, mess up, submit tickets for help, be directed to an over 100 page guide and resort to days of seeking an actual human within the company that will take the time to explain directions in clear language. All offered lessons were shown over Skype, during the same hours an individual was given to complete their actual job requirements. The tutorials consisted of someone reading words off a PowerPoint screen, stopping intermittently to ask if there were any questions (insert Ferris Bueller teacher tone).

Finally, and thankfully, I have also experienced the just right, Goldilocks Effect, type-o-training. Back in the day when Chase Bank was the National Bank of Detroit (NBD) (and also while it was Bank One) and I was too green to know it at the time, I participated in simulated computer-based training. This occurred both before I was let loose in a branch and while I was preparing for upcoming roles and responsibilities. I had an actual human teacher in the classroom during initial on-boarding while running pretend transactions on a computer, over and over and over. If I goofed up, an automated message would tell me how, and make me try again. If I didn’t understand anything, the instructor, someone who had actually worked in the position I was training for, could come over and help me through it. After being hired, any additional training was provided on a computer, while getting paid and not simultaneously being expected to keep up with my current duties. Other humans were around or as close as a phone call for a one-on-one conversation, if the need arose.

Since I have strayed from writing this entire post in the catchy, opposite tone I have set for this book, here we go:

Small Biz What Not to Do #6: Do not hang your employees out to dry after spending precious time finding and hiring them. As a good teacher would, figure out your employee’s learning style and tap into it or figure out a method or person that can do so. If you want an individual to perform an action well, you must exude effort towards training him or her until skills can be completed automatically.

I’m rooting for my next inspiration for a writing topic to travel over to another type of training, the kind I can add to my presently all-too-small Fitness Page. Thoughts of a cleanse from alcohol, this time with the added component of a quarantine (so only for a week), are starting to formulate.