4 Types of Corporate Training Every Company Must Use To Maintain Healthy Growth

Grow, grow, grow! It’s not the chant of a gardener to their favorite plant (though it might be) it’s the mantra of most CEOs and shareholders. But as we all know, uncontrolled growth becomes a cancer, and no business wants bloated processes and policies clogging up the works. To continue to grow in a healthy and sustainable way, employee corporate training must be used: and not just when you hire someone new! Corporate training is an ongoing, never-ending process and if it is done right, can lead to massive, healthy and sustained success for years to come.

1. Onboarding & New Employee Training

Businesses succeed because of great people, and getting those great hires off on the right foot is the goal of any worthwhile new employee training and onboarding protocols. What do we want a new employee training to look like?

New Employee Onboarding Must-Haves: Culture, Place and Treasure

When onboarding new staff, it is critical to give them the tools they need to succeed at your company. A new hire needs to get an immediate feel for the company culture, the requirements of their job and where they fit within the team, and finally they need to feel welcomed, valued and treasured.

Culture

Company culture is critical to establish early in the hiring process, just ask Ed Catmull, current head of Animation at Disney and the man behind Pixar’s success, starting with Toy Story. Catmull’s philosophy is that it is vital to foster an environment conducive to the success of every person, and that means getting the culture right from day one, and including the new hire and encouraging them to contribute to that culture. For more advice from Ed on management and running teams, check out his book Creativity Inc.

Place

Whether you’re onboarding a manager or an entry-level shelver, every person within an organization should know their place. And not in an authoritarian, suppressive way either; rather each person in the company should know what part they play in the success of the organization. Onboarding should teach the employee not just their job responsibilities, but also the importance of their role! Focusing on how somebody’s role helps the whole is a great way to alleviate the “small cog” morale issue many employers struggle with.

Treasure

Getting a new job is exciting, and typically hiring a new member of a team is too, but if the first day is full of blunders and missteps, it can quickly sour the employee’s opinion of the organization and make them second guess their choice. To prevent that, practice treasuring the employee– treat their first day like a first date; your best time to make a great impression. Entrepreneur magazine has some great tips on how to do just that.

Onboarding Sets The Tone For An Entire Career

If you do your onboarding right, your new hire gets firmly planted into the company like a fresh seedling: rearing and ready to grow into a productive and excited team member. As companies move toward stratified and multi-location methods of organization, often onboarding needs to take place virtually. This isn’t an excuse to do it badly, however: it’s an opportunity to use new tools to make the experience special. We cover the best ways to use hybrid onboarding in more detail here, if you’re curious in the best practices for hybrid or virtual onboarding.

2. Compliance Training & Workplace Updates Help Maintain Adaptability

To have a thriving workforce, your staff need to be able to adapt. Inflexible businesses tend to end up dead when there’s a big shakeup, which can come in the form of new laws, new zoning, new competitors, or a new disease, like Covid-19. Whatever the element is that causes the change, it is very important to be able to mobilize and often retrain your company in order to survive and continue thriving as a business.

Compliance training is also part of this adaptability: you need it to get the entire team on board with the requirements put on by new laws, company policies or initiatives. Having comprehensive compliance training starts with the mentality that to comply is to succeed: the less you have to worry about tripping over regulations, the more your team can focus on getting to work.

Compliance training also tends to work best when it is done virtually or through a Learning Management System, because it can be administered any time and almost anywhere. It’s also very easy to demonstrate compliance when everything is tracked and administered virtually: often as easy as sending a link.

Workplace updates are also a key to adapting and growing, particularly when new information comes to light. New data should lead to updates– if the numbers show that company policy isn’t being followed, it’s time to freshen up the policy and present it in a new and more effective way so that it actually gets followed. Or if the numbers reveal an opportunity the company needs to jump on, having the ability to coordinate everyone at once is going to be vital to capitalize on the opportunity. Either way, it’s important to be able to train employees, both old and new, quickly and efficiently based on new information. Having parts of your company stuck in the past due to inefficient training methods (or non-existent ones) is a recipe for obsolescence.

3. Continuing Education & Ethics Lessons Provide A Double Benefit

To help keep morale up and keep your staff up-to-date on the changes that are happening in your industry, it’s valuable to invest in continuing education and business ethics lessons. The reason is twofold.

Continuing Education Benefits The Business With Highly Trained Employees

Having the best team isn’t the only key to success in business, but it sure helps. And sometimes having the best team means training them into the best. That takes time and an investment in an LMS like Academy of Mine, but the dividends far out weigh the costs when you consider you can literally transform your already excellent team into the top 1% when you use eLearning and online training correctly.

Continuing Education Benefits The Business By Keeping The Employee Engaged & Thankful

No one wants to be caught in the past when a new technology or way of doing business splashes onto the scene. Typically this though is focused on businesses, but it also applies to staff! No one wants to be stuck using PowerPoint when the rest of the world has switched to presenting with some high-tech alternative: it makes you a less valuable employee and it means you’ll have a harder time finding new work if you need to leave your current company.

However, if the company you work for is investing in you (showing they want to keep you around and building confidence) and training you in the new tech, you suddenly have a very good reason to stick around and to work hard. Nobody works harder than someone who is thankful that they are seen as an asset, and constantly keeping your team on the cutting edge teaches them that you as a company value them.

4. Management & Leadership Training Keeps Morale Up And Boosts Hiring-From-Within

There are a lot of anecdotes that show that employers who hire from and promote from within are much more likely to succeed in the long run. This means that giving your team the skills to grow and eventually lead others is critical for continued, exceptional achievement. Taking the time to invest in what amounts to “a chance to get promoted” will make employees excited to take the training (a rare enough thing by itself) and it will give your team new skills that will better help them work as a unit. If everybody takes the same management classes, they can be more empathetic toward their own manager and they can learn how best to work for that person’s benefit, removing clutter and speeding up the process. eLearning can help with this type of management and leadership training, especially if you integrate video into the lessons.