Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to material retail dumps episode nine. This is the next episode nurse series on hiring, managing and motivating employees. I love this topic and I think it's not given its fair share of attention. A lot of owners and managers only spend time on employees when have an issue at that moment. For example, maybe you'll redo your training methods as you're training someone for the fourth time, that week on the same thing, or maybe you'll learn a new way of hiring when you're in between managers. This tends to lead to playing defense, and we all know that the best defense is a good offense. In this next episode, we'll spend a couple of minutes discussing training methods and ensuring you're able to onboard and employee quickly and successfully. All right, so this episode is gonna be about onboarding and training new employees. We're gonna go over four things that I hope will help onboard and train employees.

Um, whether you're onboarding someone who's gonna be working one day a week or someone who's gonna be managing your store these first couple days and weeks of these employees, tenure at your company can potentially be the most important piece. We all know how important first impressions are. And this is the real first impression that both the employee will have on your business in a working environment. And secondly, this is the first impression you'll have of the employee when you're actually working with them. So it's very important to make sure that the deck is not stacked against them and they're being set up for success. So first I think it's super important to be real, just be yourself and be the genuine person that you are. There's no reason to act really nice on the first day that they're there when you're training them or the opposite.

There's no reason to be really tough to come off that you have a really strict working environment, because they're gonna be able to see through that really quickly. If in the first three days of their employment, you're super nice to them, or you just treat them differently than you treat other employees. And then three months later you're treating them like your real self they'll notice at that point may decide that this is not for me. And you would've known that in the first week. Um, had you just acted like you would act the entire time. We see it all the time. When employees start at companies and the manager or the owner of the company is just acting super different than they would have done. Otherwise it tends to lead to a bad working relationship going forward because there's just, non-realistic expectations of how that employee's gonna be treated over the course of their employment.

We wanna make sure that going into, going into this relationship, that everything is just clear, open, honest, and easy, so that any issues that may arise, they come up early so we can figure it out. We don't want to be three months in after we just spent all this time, training someone. Now we rely on them and all of a sudden they become, become unhappy with the real working environment and they leave. And then we're back at square one. So it's super important to just be real and just be yourself when you're training someone. Second thing I think is really important is to have one trainer, we want one person onboarding and training this person, whether it's you as the owner or just the manager of the

Store. We want that one person to be the source of truth for all the information that they get. We don't need two people telling them different things about different ways of doing things. Um, there should be no confusion when someone's being turned. If you like to greet customers a certain way, or if you ring people up at the register a certain way in order for that employee to be consistent in the way they act and the way they work, we're gonna need consistent training. If on a Monday, a new employee is being trained by one person on ways to greet customers. And then on Tuesday, they're trained by another person. And that second person just says something a little bit different about the way you greet customers. Even if it's as simple as instead of hi, we say hello, it's just gonna lead to confusion and we don't want any confusion.

The training process, number three, we wanna write it all down. We need everything to be written down school. You were definitely taught that you take notes because you learn differently when you start writing, versus when you listening or you learn differently when you watch a video versus when the teacher speaks. It's the same thing. When you're training a new employee, that employee is gonna learn certain things from the way you speak. They're gonna learn certain things from reading it. They're gonna learn certain things from watching you do it. So having a rule book, guidebook, just a couple of rules, written down a page or different processes written down, just get everything in writing this way. There's a no questions afterwards. And if there are questions, they can always go back and look at, um, what you wrote down for them. And B they're more likely to grasp it if they read it and then they heard it from you and then they saw you do it in action.

Number four, I think the most important thing is to take it slow. I think that many people, when they're training someone new, they expect that that person already knows so much more than they actually know. You have to remember, this is the first, second or third day with this employee in your business. And they don't know what you know, they don't know what a sales associate knows. It's been working with you for six months. So that being said, we don't wanna overload them with information. We want to give them some core tasks in the beginning. We wanna make sure that they're getting exactly the information they need to do their job and do their job well. And then you can worry about them learning other aspects of the business as you go. But if you're hiring a salesperson and you try to teach them 212 things on the second day, it's just not gonna work well, focus your time on, on treat, on how they should treat customers, how they should speak to customers, how they should wardrobe customers, how they should active customers to get them to spend more. Instead of focusing your time, your time, teaching them the hundred different things that they may or may not need to do in the future of working at your store. I just wanna conclude again with reiterating how important of a time it is for this employee to come into your store. It's their first couple days in the store and we need them to get off on the right, but well, that's it for today. Thanks for listening.