How to Develop Training Programs for Your Small Business: Step-by-Step & What You Need to Get Started

Small business owners have enough on their plates without constantly worrying whether their employees are doing their jobs effectively.

You want your business to run smoothly, even when you aren’t there to keep your eye on things.

The easiest way to ensure that your employees meet your expectations is to hire quality candidates and train them effectively. Let’s focus on creating training programs for your small business that actually work.

Check out a video summary of this article.

Why You Need a Training Program

For every business owner who is frustrated with their employees, there are employees frustrated with their boss.

As absolutely infuriating as it is for you to see an employee doing something incorrectly after communicating your expectations multiple times, it is also difficult to be an employee who feels that they cannot do anything right.

Developing an effective training program for your employees is one of the best ways to avoid creating a situation that breeds frustration for both you and your employees.

Most people want to do well in their roles at work. Investing in employee training is one way to help your employees thrive.

Experience shows that people who do well at work are encouraged to do even better in the future. A staff member who receives positive feedback and sees results on the job will strive for higher achievement than one who is discouraged by consistently poor performance.

Success breeds success.

Motivation to do well is intrinsic, within your employee, and extrinsic, coming from outside sources. For example, an employee who consistently sells expensive products on commission will be intrinsically motivated by the desire to keep winning sales and extrinsically motivated by the additional commission money in their paycheck.

As a small business owner, you want to tap into your staff’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Give them that commission money, but also create an environment where your employees feel valued, want to be successful, and have the tools to continue growing and thriving professionally.

A training program also allows you to standardize the way things are done within your business. There will be less confusion if everyone is trained the same way, especially under busy or chaotic circumstances.

An Anecdote: “The Follow Up Call Thing”

Here is a quick story that highlights the importance of effective training programs — It’s a personal story about my first job after I finished my undergraduate degree….Honestly, it was a bit of a disaster, but also a learning experience.

The job was an office management position for a start-up that provided research solutions for hedge funds. The company itself was excellent, and I met some cool people working there, but I was not successful in my role.

To preface, I took this job after years of managing designer retail stores in a small business setting, and after finishing a double Bachelor’s in professional communications and history with two marketing/PR internships. I am mentioning this to emphasize that I was not unqualified, but I was certainly very new to the industry and the setting of this new role.

Reflecting on why I was unsuccessful, I believe it was because I was not appropriately trained, and I was too green to know that I needed more training and how to ask for it. One example sums up my entire experience at this company — I think of it in my head as “the follow-up call thing.”

Part of my role was to make follow-up calls after other people in the company reached out to potential clients. Now, this might sound silly, but I did not know what a “follow-up call” actually was. I often made follow-up calls in the past, but I had never heard them referred to by that phrase before. Additionally, I had absolutely no idea what the context of the initial call was, so I didn’t really know what I was following up on.

This entire situation made me highly nervous, and I made these phone calls secretly hoping that nobody would answer the phone. I probably seemed like the world’s most timid employee, afraid to make a phone call. I hated feeling that way, and I’m sure my employer hated that I was making calls representing his company like that.

Today, I think: Why didn’t I just ask someone for help? Why didn’t I just say: “Hey, what exactly are these calls about?” I don’t know why — I guess because I was new, nervous, and inexperienced. The whole situation shook my confidence and, along with a few similar ones, deteriorated my job performance and value to the company.

I am sharing this (somewhat embarrassing) example to make a simple point: If you have strong training programs in place, your employees will perform better for your business. If someone had just told me what the calls were and what I was following up on, I would have made each one with my usual confidence speaking to clients.

While I absolutely accept responsibility for my failure to ask for help, if there had been a more effective training program in place, I never would have had to do so. Especially when hiring younger professionals or people new to your industry, adequate training will go a long way towards success.

Your new employees don’t know what they don’t know — but you do, and you can help them.

How to Develop Your Training Program (Step-by-Step)

The idea of creating employee training programs can seem daunting.

Especially in small businesses, where people often wear many hats, and there is more of an “all-hands-on-deck” mentality, it can feel impossible to create a program that can teach everything your employees need to know.

Here is a step-by-step to help you get started.

1. Divide Your Staff into Groups by Role

Group your staff by role, based on what they do for your business. It’s okay if there is some overlap for certain positions. Ideally, you want to create a specific training program for each role to avoid confusion and streamline your training.

Example: A small grocery store might divide employees into the following roles: cashiers, inventory, deli counter, custodial, back office, and management.

2. Create a List of Topics for Each Group

Put yourself in your employees’ shoes. What does an employee in each group need to know to do their job successfully?

If you’re having trouble here, try the following:

• Brainstorm a list of questions that employees often ask
• Spend the day circulating and observing employees within each group. What do they do most often? What do they struggle with? What work habits do they exhibit that you would like to change?
• Ask your most successful employees for their input. Focus primarily on those who already train your new staff and those who have habits that you would like others to adopt.
• Ask your newer employees what was most helpful in their initial training. Ask them what they still have questions about or what they wish had been elaborated on during their training.

The list of topics that you create will become your training program’s initial outline and structure.

3. Write Learning Objectives for Each Topic

Now that you have the topics you need to cover, write learning objectives for each one.

A learning objective is something that you would expect an employee to learn how to do after covering the topic. You can have as many as you need to thoroughly cover the topic you are planning.

Structure your learning objectives as “The employee can…” to make this process easier.

Example: A cashier training program might have the topic: Accepting Payments. A learning objective could be: The employee can correctly count change for a customer paying in cash.

As you move forward with the process, you will probably add, change, or remove some of these objectives. That’s completely normal and a sign that you are doing it right.

4. Create a List of Resources/Strategies to Help Employees Meet Their Training Objectives

You are almost finished planning, which is the bulk of getting your training program off the ground.

Sit back and take a look at your topics and learning objectives. Jot down a list of resources and strategies that will help your employees meet their learning objectives.

Popular examples include:

• Written instructions available on-site
• Written instructions available via mobile device
• Training videos
• Verbal instructions from another staff member
• Hands-on training under the supervision of another staff member

5. Create Your Training Program

All you have left to do now is create your training program.

If you have followed the steps above, you already know what you need to do. Now, it’s time to implement the plan.

Organize each training program by group, topic, and learning objective. Create the resources you decided would be best for each one and make them easily accessible to your staff. Put it all together and you have your training programs.

6. Communicate Your New Training Program

Finally, you are ready to share your training program with new and existing employees to help them succeed in their roles. Make it available as a physical document or online, easily accessible from any device.

If this seems like an enormous undertaking that you don’t have time for, hire a professional to do it for you. We create custom staff portals, printable training materials, training video libraries, and more to help your employees run your business as you would.

What You Need to Know About Creating Successful Employee Training Programs

Not all employee training programs are created equal. Follow these top tips for developing effective training plans that will continue to work well over time.

Customize Learning Objectives by Role

We mentioned this above but need to emphasize it here: Develop learning objectives for each specific role in your business.

If you attempt to create one training plan and one set of learning objectives for your entire staff, the result is often confusing and unusable.

By organizing your training plan by employee role, you will ensure that your staff knows what exactly applies to them and can easily find relevant information within the training content.

Be Consistent & Hold People Accountable

Once you implement a new training initiative, it is essential to hold your staff accountable for following your instructions.

In my opinion, this is the trickiest part of creating new training protocols and standardizing the way things are run in your business.

It can be challenging to respectfully ask experienced employees to change their ways. It is even more difficult to determine what to do if they are not receptive to your new policies.

However, it is vital to overcome this challenge if you want your new procedures to be effective. You can hire a new employee and provide them with your new training protocols, but they are unlikely to follow them if they see more experienced staff in their role doing things differently.

A few tips to help you in this situation:

Train, but Don’t Micro-Manage

Try not to mandate every little thing that your employees do. If you pick your battles effectively, your staff will follow your instructions when it matters. For example, I once worked with a manager who wasted valuable energy insisting that all her employees take cash out of the drawer with two fingers instead of three. This was probably unnecessary and definitely bred frustration among her staff, who no longer took her requests seriously.

Ask Why Skeptical Employees Don’t Want to Follow Your New Policy

If you have a trusted and beloved staff member who does not want to follow a new policy, engage them in conversation. They might have feedback that will help you tweak the procedure to make it even better.

Test out Radically New Policy before Full Implementation.

If you are making significant changes in the way things are run, ask a few staff members if they are interested in trying it out before implementing the change company-wide.

These focus groups can provide valuable information and help you get skeptical staff members on board as they see the new protocols in practice.

Avoid Being Condescending or Patronizing.

You know that you are the business owner and ultimately, what you say goes. However, speaking down to your staff will only make them less willing to do what you want them to do.

Explain why you are making the changes that you are making. Help them understand the value of what you want them to do. Avoid “textbook” exercises that look good on paper but only make your staff members feel spoken down to in practice.

There are countless examples of these to-be-avoided exercises. One typical example is forced role play, in which you ask an experienced employee to play a customer to try to teach them some sort of lesson.

Another example is team learning exercises that provide on-the-ground employees with theoretical concepts that disregard their professional experience.

Instead, focus on your employees’ real experience first and foremost.

Structure your conversations in a way that helps them see the value that the policy change will bring to their everyday reality. Show employees how your solutions can solve real problems they or the business face every day.

Be Ready to Make the Tough Decisions When Necessary.

At the end of the day, it is your company, and you need your employees to work with you to realize your vision for the business.

Employees need to get on board if you change a policy. If they can’t, it might be time to weigh the value of that employee vs. the cost of them de-legitimizing your policies and authority in your business.

Consider Re-Structuring Roles in the Organization.

If you weigh your options and decide that a particular employee is too valuable to lose but know that they won’t comply with the new policy you are implementing, consider giving them a new role or title in your business.

This role change might be in name only, but it allows you to explain to other employees that someone is doing things differently because they are in a different role.

Invest in Quality Training Materials

Quality training materials, whether they are physical paper, short videos, or an online library, are crucial to the long-term success of your training program.

Right now, you are probably feeling gung-ho about getting started and implementing your new training policies and procedures. Over time, that enthusiasm might fade in the face of other obligations or more pressing immediate issues within your business.

Ensuring that your protocols are solidified into materials that new and existing employees can easily access will ensure that your new policies stay in place, even when you are focused on other things. A quality training program keeps itself alive by becoming embedded into the routines of your entire staff.

The nature of your ideal materials will vary depending on your business practices. Still, we generally recommend a series of printable materials with an accompanying digital library in an online staff portal.

Employees can reference the printable tools where you prefer them not to be on an electronic device, such as behind the bar or on the retail floor, but also have access to the complete training library at the tips of their fingers on any mobile device.

Online staff portals provide an easy way for staff to view schedules, announcements, and links to other important websites they might need to access.

Select Instructors Wisely

Choose the people who will train your staff wisely. Give them a new title that reflects their role as a new staff liaison or instructor. Train them how to train others.

Look for staff members that have the following characteristics:

• Patient and approachable
• Successful and experienced in their role
• Believes in the policies that they are teaching
• Understands your vision and wants to see your business succeed

Be Transparent About Business Goals & Branding

Many training programs often leave out a conversation about what you want to accomplish as the business owner and the image you hope to present with your business. Include this in your training protocols!

If your employees understand your brand, they will be better suited to creating an environment that promotes it.

If your employees understand your vision, they are more likely to become invested in the success of your business and to help you meet your goals.

What You Need to Know About Adult Learning Principles

Luckily, the author of this post (waves hello) also has a master’s degree in education. Let’s run through a few quick concepts that will help you communicate better and reach your employees as you teach them something new.

Many Adults are Visual Learners

Most adults, and all people for that matter, are visual learners.

Show your staff examples of successfully completed paperwork. Provide a video explanation of what something should look like. Give them a photograph of exactly how that correctly set table should look or the proper folding method of the jeans on the sale table.

Avoid overwhelming your employees with text. Most people simply won’t read through a lot of text unless they are searching for something quick and easy to reference. (I know, it’s rich to hear that from the person currently writing a blog post topping 3000 words — But I’ll include images, I promise!)

Once is Not Enough for Most People

Most people cannot hear something once and learn it right away.

For this reason, provide people with multiple points of reference to learn something new.

An Example:

1. A New-Employee Instructor (experienced employee) teaches a new employee how to use the credit card machine
2. Next to the credit card machine is a printed-out, step-by-step procedure explaining how to use the machine. A more comprehensive library in the online staff portal covers potential issues during a sale, such as standard error messages or changing the receipt paper.
3. The instructor watches the new employee conduct multiple sales with the credit card machine
4. The new employee conducts sales on their own, using the printed step-by-step next to the machine
5. The new employee runs into an error while making a sale. The instructor steps in to help resolve the issue without disrupting the customer. The instructor then directs the new employee to a video in the online staff portal to review fixing the error message on their own in the future.

“We” Can Go a Long Way

Your employees will be more likely to follow you if they feel invested in the business and are part of the decision-making process.

Allow and encourage your employees to provide feedback on how things are run and consider their input when implementing new protocols. If you don’t trust your staff enough to take their input seriously, it might be time to reconsider your hiring practices.

Use language such as “we” and “ours.” Avoid “me” or “my.” Say: “Our window display looks great today!” instead of “My window display looks great today!” Say “the team” or “our team” instead of “my team.”

These seemingly insignificant changes can make an enormous difference to employee satisfaction and willingness to work hard for the success of your business.

Self-Directed Resources Are Worth the Investment

Invest in materials that new employees can access after their training ends, such as a printed employee manual or online training library.

This will help ensure that your new employees have a place to turn while others are busy and can be self-sufficient in the face of typical problems that arise on the job.

A Combination of Hands-On & Theoretical Training Works Best

Your employees will learn best with a combination of hands-on practice and being taught how to do something.

Try this structure:

1. Teach your employee how to do something
2. Supervise your employee while they do it
3. Provide feedback and answer questions afterwards
4. Provide self-directed resources for future reference

Wrapping Up

This was a long article, and it covered a lot.

Here’s the gist:

An effective employee training program will go a long way towards making your employees and business more successful.

Easily create your new training program using our six-step process.

For ultimate results, follow our tips for success and best practices for adult learners when creating your training programs.