Training Your New Employees
“Expecting new employees to learn your business through osmosis is a scary way of tackling such an important process.” So says Tim Huckabee, author of “Breaking in New Hires”, an article appearing in Florist Review Magazine, August, 2007.
Training for your new employees includes more than making sure they can design a beautiful gift basket. There’s lots of information they need to know about your business so that they can answer your customers’ questions and provide the type of service that your customers expect. Here are some thoughts about what you might do to train your new hires.
Create a Training Manual. This can be a time consuming project, but will be well worth it. Ask your current employees to help you decide what should be included in the manual. Once it’s finished, you can use this again and again. Include the following:
- A brief description of the vision for your business. What are your goals? Who do you serve?
- Full business name, address, phone and fax numbers, web site address, email address, hours of operation.
- Policies: How to handle returns, damage, and complaints.
- Deliveries: Options for delivery; charges.
- Who to Ask: Include a short description of what each employee does so that your new hire knows who to ask for what!
Set Up A Training Schedule. Your new hire will benefit from spending time in every department and with each of your current employees. Regardless of the position that your new hire will fill, having a thorough understanding of others’ roles will help provide a good understanding of how your business runs. For example, the new bookkeeper should spend time with the designers to get a better sense of why designs are priced as they are. Designers should join delivery people to see what happens to their designs after they leave the shop. Having employees learn about the details of other’s jobs will also help to create more of a “team effort” attitude.
2 comments September 12th, 2007
