Employee training is the cornerstone of a professional workforce and a successful business. In small to medium-sized businesses, business owners are usually the personas in charge of training, with their primary goal being to bring employees to a value-producing state, fast! They want to make sure that the time from recruitment of a new employee to the minute they produce value - is as short as possible. Business owners don’t necessarily have a background in the training world or are knowledgeable on methodologies or best practices, but nevertheless need to find ways to provide employees with everything they need to know to get the job done. In this article we'll go over some challenges small to medium-sized business owners face and how Connecteam can help in bridging the gap.
What Are The Challenges For Small-Medium Business Owners?
What's true for training in larger businesses can apply to smaller businesses as well. Traditional, face-to-face, training can be extremely costly, time-consuming, and a logistical nightmare. Meanwhile, employees may not understand the need or value of the training and may find themselves uninterested and disengaged. For smaller businesses, there are a few more unique characteristics to their challenges.
Limited Resources: Small businesses often have limited financial resources, making allocating funds for comprehensive employee training programs challenging. They may struggle to invest in hiring dedicated trainers or purchasing training materials and software. These challenges result in doing the bare minimum for employees in training.
Time Constraints: Small business owners often wear multiple hats and have numerous responsibilities they need to juggle. Finding time for employee training while managing daily operations can be difficult.
Staffing Constraints: In small businesses, there may be a limited number of employees available to handle various tasks. If an employee is designated as a trainer, their absence from their primary role may impact overall productivity. Moreover, small businesses may struggle to find suitable replacements to cover for employees during training periods.
Lack of Expertise: Small business owners may lack expertise in designing and delivering effective training programs, as they may not have a dedicated HR team or training manager who has experience with designing instructional materials. This can result in lower-quality training methods and materials, leading to ineffective learning outcomes thereby slowing the process of employees giving value back to the business.
How to Utilize Connecteam in Small-Medium Businesses
We believe training should be regarded as an integral and ongoing component of an employee’s professional development and lifecycle. Training can be ANYTHING, delivered at any time. Any update to do the job better, any information needed to perform a task, any refresher - those are all training pieces that can be useful for employees.
As an all-in-one solution, Connecteam simplifies training, making it easier than ever to keep all your employees skilled and professional from anywhere at any time. As a business owner, say goodbye to your hesitations, as Connecteam’s solutions save your business time and money! Features such as Courses, Updates, and Knowledge Base grants your employees independence and keeps them engaged as they gain the training they need to start working and contributing value to your business. Business owners will find creating training materials easy and highly customizable with their various capabilities and flexibility to edit along the way. Businesses won't need a dedicated training manager, as Connecteam delivers a training experience that is efficient, user-friendly, and can be done easily on the go.
Courses - Our Courses feature is the base for your training infrastructure, for everything from onboarding to ongoing training, compliance, and more. It saves the business owner time in content creation and retains information for whenever they need it, thereby removing unnecessary face-to-face training and retaining a pre-set onboarding process for the next onboarded employee in the future. The rich assortment of tools in the feature inspires content creation (videos, quizzes, forms, links, audio) and alleviates the burden to devise innovative ways to captivate the employee. Employees can undertake the training independently, and at their own pace, without needing to find time to meet with experienced staff members or the business owner. In addition, the resources required to create a course are minimal, only requiring a computer for setup and an employee's mobile phone to access!
Updates - Creating updates is great for sending out important pieces of information that your employees need to know in that instant. Business owners can send updates on the go on the mobile app, therefore wasting no time and all and still allowing them to dedicate most of their time to other day-to-day functions. For need-to-know content, they can use the pop-up update capability to ensure that all of their employees have seen it.
Chat - For small businesses, the chat is the perfect tool for internal communications and information exchange. By opening a team chat, employees in their training can use this forum to ask questions and get answers, quickly. If the business owner can't answer immediately, other veteran employees can jump in and help out!
Knowledge Base - The Knowledge Base enables business owners to store all relevant information about the company in one central location. Business owners can upload company policies and manuals, and include links and files for onboarded employees to access and learn from. This further strengthens the employees’ autonomy and removes the dependence on the business owner to guide them through the learning process.
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