Rules of Thumb for Training New Employees

If you are expecting to hire someone and have them hit the ground running you are in for a rough time. Even if the person seems to know all the technical skills and knows your industry they still have to learn the culture goals, roles, procedures, and interpersonal dynamics at play with the job. This also applies to people who were previous employees who come back to work for you.

Before hiring you’ll want to gauge a few things about the position.

  1. What are the measurable outcomes that determine success for each of the tasks and the job as a whole
  2. What behaviors do you want to see from someone in the position and how do you know if they are living up to those behaviors
  3. For repetitive tasks do you have some sort of standard work document
  4. Allot time for training the new person to their role.

One of the biggest questions our clients have is how much time do we spend on training.  That depends on complexity, risk exposure, and desired outcome for the tasks.  If you have a very complex task that is a high risk exposure to the business then you will want to spend longer on that tasks.  The general rule of thumb is that if it takes 1 minute of time to execute a task it takes about 6 minutes of training.  So for a 5 minute task you will want to spend 30 minutes of training to be sure the person can perform that task at a high level with out supervision.  This can be done over time and doesn’t have to be all at once.

To recap you want to determine success criteria for the job, behaviors you want to see, and create a time budget for the amount of time it would take to train the new person to be proficient at their job using the 6:1 ratio.

If you want to learn more about how to create a training program  apply for a discovery call now and we can do a deep dive discovery of your situation at no cost if you qualify.

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