Ways to Effectively Re-train Employees

Sometimes employees don’t get understand the way of an organization doing things the first time.  Maybe it’s a new process or policy change that creates the need to re-train and talk to our employees.  In industries like banking, healthcare, and finance typically a change in law or response to a recent customer situation often leads to the need to re-train.  We’ll discuss 5 effective ways to re-train your current and future employees.

It’s important to remember that re-training does not necessarily imply a punishment or a recovery measure for delinquent employees.  Re-training involves education and skill improvement.  Even though retraining may seem an unnecessary chore to experienced professionals, it is essential in order to remain both efficient in the workplace and competitive in the job market.

Defining the Job

When employees need to be taken out of their normal routine into a new job role, new policy, or structure, define it. Itemize the main points or duties of the new task or policy. Ideally you’ll have the new primary responsibilities lined out, but that is not always the case. You’ll need to manage your employee’s knowledge, skill, and ability to perform the new task or adhere to new policies while training.

Follow-up: Setting An Appointment

 Once the trainings have come to an end, make sure to set a follow-up appointment with your employees 3-6 months out to see how they are doing with the new material or changes. A lot of times the need to re-train an employee comes from policy changes or changes in corporate structure. When bigger items like those listed arise, it’s important to get feedback once the changes have been implemented for a period of time. Setting the appointment on the calendar in the beginning makes it harder to delay a follow-up meeting.

Feedback

This is one of the most effective ways to re-train your employees. Unless management is open to feedback, trainings will come and go without information being retained. Make sure to talk to your employees about the information presented and if they have any feedback to either better new implementations in your workplace or about how the material was presented.

Learnng Style

When re-training employees it’s important to understand what type of learner your employees are. By recognizing and understanding their employee styles, you will be able to use better techniques suited for their needs. This will improve the speed and quality of re-training. The most common learning styles are visual, verbal, physical, logical, social, solitary, and aural.

Communication

This seems like a no-brainer, but clear communication is the biggest item on this list. Without being able to communicate the purpose, relevance, and value the training has to your employee, there won’t be a connection. Since all employees learn differently it’s important that you are utilizing appropriate communication styles based on whom you’re talking to. If there is a big policy change that affects the entire company, use a variety of methods by speaking with a background and having an interactive portion. Unless you are able to communicate changes affectively, re-training your employees will not be successful.

While re-training your employees is a necessary step in the corporate world, there are ways that will allow you to maximize your ROI when doing so. Take a look at these 5 steps and determine the course of action your business takes when deciding to retain employees on various necessary topics.

How do you train employees?

What training techniques have worked for you in the past? 

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