Create Great Company Culture with Great Staff Training

There’s an intimate connection between how businesses train their staff and the type of company culture they have.

The right staff training actually provides the necessary framework so that employees can perform at their best, with confidence as well as creativity. It’s this type of framework that can foster and support great talent, while at the same time allow the freedom your team needs to be real achievers.

If there isn’t any real structure that outlines business conduct, process and values, the unlimited freedom or lack of control can quickly breed uncertainty and feel almost oppressive to your staff. It just kills any chance of a great company culture.

There has to be a balance of structure and freedom. A good staff training program provides the framework for that balance.

What is company culture?

In essence, company culture is created by the conduct, beliefs and values within the group. A company’s culture begins with the owners and managers and is passed down and perpetuated through the rest of the team.

The most basic thing to understand about company culture is that it’s an outcome. It’s a result of something.

Think cause and effect. The guidance employees receive in their training (or lack of it) is the cause, and the company culture is the effect.

Generally speaking, the development of any culture comes about like this:

Individuals in a group of people have ideas, values, knowledge and skills. They pass them onto others in the group. The passing of this knowledge, whether formally or informally, repeats itself.

Through these iterations certain patterns and traditions are born and the tangible fruits of this process come into being all over a particular society or group in the form of art and other commodities. These values, traditions and commodities are the very things that make up its culture. They are inextricably linked in an ongoing process.

When we talk about business culture, it’s really no different than societal culture. It’s just on a smaller scale. And instead of saying “values, traditions, commodities,” it might be more practical to say, “training, workflow processes, outcomes.”

So, if you want a stable and enjoyable company culture for all, it’s very hard to accomplish without having a well-thought out and effective training programs.

Below are listed 3 really important things to do to create an awesome and inspiring company culture through your staff training program.

#1 Be organized in your approach to staff training.

It’s very hard to build anything let alone a great company culture if you don’t take an organized approach. Being organized means setting things up in a logical sequence so you get the desired result.

Some key elements of being organized would be to...

Have a plan.

Make sure it's well-designed and makes sense. Sketch out how you think it should look. Start with the basics and keep it very simple. You can flesh out the details later as you build upon it.

To take an organized approach, you'll also want to...

Standardize and document your business processes.

Nothing breeds more uncertainty and confusion than unknown or constantly changing ways of doing things when it comes to your business processes. So when it comes to taking an organized approach, standardizing and documenting is unavoidable.

Companies run best when there are standard operating procedures (SOPs) that are based on best practices.

If at all possible, as soon as a business starts to expand from one or two partners into a core group of people, then job descriptions, checklists and process write-ups should be developed and compiled.

If you have a business that’s well established and still haven’t documented your SOP’s, get started now. It’s much harder to try and “catch up” with the documenting process once the business reaches a certain size, so start doing it as early as you can.

Ideally, as new hires come on to take the load off an already established position or process, the checklists and guides can be created by the person who has held the job successfully (with management’s input/approval) and then handed off to the new incumbent. The person who’s moving off the position is the best candidate (if they held the position successfully) to move up the organizational chart to a management position.

This creates a vacuum underneath him and is a very natural way for a business to expand and scale. The most knowledgeable and skilled staff move up and the newer less experienced hires then have a pathway forward using the documented SOPs available to them.

Another key part of being organized with your staff training would be to...

Make the SOPs and training materials accessible.

All of the work a business does in organizing the documentation of their business processes is wasted if the materials are not made accessible to the employees who need them.

These training materials can become inaccessible in a multitude of ways. Some of them are:

• Failure to organize them in such a way that they can easily be referenced when needed.
  

• Failure to consistently maintain the materials so they’re updated and reflect current practices.
  

• Making them too complex and overwhelming to be studied or followed.

Making the materials accessible has to be part of your planning when it comes to putting this all together.

Lastly, if you want to be really organized in your onboarding and staff training...

Utilize training software.

There are some great subscription software products (also called Learning Management Systems) that will help you take an organized approach to putting the training materials all together and, just as importantly, maintain them once you’ve done the work.

To learn find out about a fantastic, cloud-based employee training platform, read our review of Trainual here.

Companies are always changing, striving for better outcomes and setting new objectives. Employee training software will help your business pivot, scale and expand deftly.

There are many popular Learning Management Systems (LMS) solutions, so do your research carefully to ensure you choose the one that meets your needs and is easy to use.

But also realize that an LMS will not produce and organize your training content for you. Only you can do that.

The bottom line when it comes to taking an organized approach to your staff training…

Employees dislike uncertainty and chaos. It stresses them out, can make them doubtful of their own abilities and breed failure. If you want to attract great talent and have a positive and exciting company culture filled with happy, confident and capable employees, getting a well-organized training program put together is a must.

#2 Create career pathways with your staff training.

When new employees enter a business, there’s nothing more off-putting than the feeling that it’s a “dead-end job.” You can give new employees that impression in many different ways, but one big way is by not having any real clear path to further their careers inside your company.

What’s a company culture like when employees feel like they’re going nowhere fast? Exactly. Pretty uninspiring.

Key steps to take when creating career pathways with staff training would be to…

Scale your business through a “training, performance and promotion” method.

By using your training materials to tape out an upwardly mobile path that is visible and that employees can strive for, you’ll allow your business to scale organically by promoting the most qualified candidates from within.

This not only increases employee skills, but also their hope, confidence, creativity and imagination. Knowing they can achieve greater heights and that they're supported in their professional growth helps them feel like their contribution is meaningful. And it is!

This type of scaling also fosters real longevity in your employees. Invest in them and they’ll invest in the business.

The bottom line when it comes to creating career pathways with your staff training…

Employees like to feel secure and confident in their futures. They want to know that they’re moving toward a destination and getting somewhere when it comes to their job. Providing a staff training program that helps employees scale with the business can create an inspirational and exciting company culture. Employees will always strive for greater heights and your company will reap the rewards.

#3 Cultivate creativity and initiative with your staff training.

Sometimes I see businesses that implement their onboarding process and staff training in such a way that it intimidates and stifles the staff. Most of the time when I see this, it’s usually very unintentional. But it puts a real damper on the company culture nonetheless.

Who wants to work in a place where you feel like someone’s watching every step you take, or motion you make? Or your boss makes you feel like you don’t have the intelligence to figure it out? Talk about a super-restrictive atmosphere.

To cultivate creativity and initiative within your staff, a couple of important points are…

Don’t smother employees with training.

Employees are hired to use their skills and smarts to accomplish a job and get results. Most hires have the intelligence and prior skill-sets to perform well, even if you do need to fine-tune or expand on their training with your own company-specific processes.

As you train them in these, try and make sure that your training doesn’t discount or invalidate what they already know.

One way to avoid this is to start with the big picture when training. Go wide angle first, then methodically and strategically fill in the parts of the picture that they’re missing.

For example, if it’s a receptionist you’re training, give him or her the overall purpose of the position as a starting point, such as:

“The purpose of your job here is to ensure that everyone who arrives at the reception desk or calls on the phone is greeted in a friendly, professional manner, their specific business with us is established, and that they’re directed to the correct person in our company as rapidly and efficiently as possible.”

In this way, the person now having the parameters of the position will be able to use their own judgment and initiative toward that job purpose, even if they don’t have all the details yet.

Then step-by-step give them the greeting script, show them how the phone system works, provide them with the company directory of names and positions, and fill in any remaining holes in their training.

As you go along, if they already have mastery of a specific part of the job, have them demonstrate it, acknowledge them with a “well done!” and move on.

Another point to understand so you don't dampen your staff's initiative and creativity is...

Training employees doesn’t mean providing them with all the answers.

You hire people to help you achieve company goals. You hire them to help provide answers to the problems of scaling the company. Utilize them in this capacity. And don’t think it’s up to you to provide all the solutions. It’s not. That’s what you pay them for!

After you lay out the purpose of their position in their training and give them the specifics they need to function well, then give them the creative license they’ll need in order to fulfill their job purpose.

If there are certain things that they'll need management approval on, then fine, lay that out in a policy as part of their training. But let them get on with solving the problems of their own positions. Otherwise you'll feel the weight of all the decision-making on your own shoulders! (Maybe you already do.)

The bottom line when it comes to cultivating creativity and initiative with your staff training…

Employees want to have a job that allows them to flex their brain muscles. They don’t want mindless, endless rules that smother and don’t allow them to engage their own reasoning abilities.

If you create a staff training approach with this in mind, you’ll have a company culture that not only breeds creativity and initiative, but will inspire genius.

Summary:

Your staff training programs should excite, strengthen, embolden and make your employees capable of tackling any circumstance or goal.

Just imagine what your company culture would be like if you had a team of capable, strong, excited, inspired, and imaginative creators and producers who are in it for the long haul.

It'd be the best company culture a business could have!

And maybe you already have that team. If so, we want to hear from you!

Drop us a message below and give us feedback on how your training programs are impacting your own company culture.