Improving SMB Learning And Development Efforts
If your company has less than ten people, there’s a chance that you’re running a small company that has a meager training budget and not much time to spare for training. It’s normal for small businesses to struggle with finding the resources to develop the skills of their workers while maintaining the required production or service standards.
Small businesses like yours may not have the funding or resources of your larger competitors for learning and development initiatives, but that doesn’t mean you should completely disregard it. Here are some useful tips to make sure you can still foster learning and development in your small enterprise:
- Embrace technology
Fostering a culture of continuous learning is essential for all businesses. Still, it’s especially important for those who need to make the most of their resources. With technology’s rapid growth across all industries, your workforce should also be able to adapt to these changes in order to facilitate the efficient running of your business.
Using specialized software and online tools can benefit your small team, regardless of the type of services and products you offer. You can leverage technology to simplify workflows, manage scheduling, organize bookings and communicate with your customers. For example, a dog walking business can take advantage of software like Jobber to organize their client schedule and customer info.
A good approach to this is letting your team have early access to the tools you plan on using for the business. Doing so will help your team get a feel for the software while also allowing them to identify potential issues that may get in the way of their work. Try your best to accommodate their ideas and think of how you can implement viable suggestions.
- Identify your team’s strengths and weaknesses
There’s a good chance that you already have some type of learning in your small business, formal or not. But before you can begin developing your own learning culture, you must dismantle it and then rebuild it. This entails evaluating the training materials given to your staff, how they are currently learning, and what they are learning.
You may be sending an invoice template manually, and that’s how it’s been since your business started. But perhaps it’s time to address that manual processes can be a weakness getting in the way of streamlining your workflow. When you know your team’s current learning strategy, you can assess what type of training they need based on their education and current skillset.
Through the assessment, you can determine your organization’s learning strengths and weaknesses. From there, you may develop a strategy that encourages the growth of your workforce.
- Don’t just focus on technical skills
Technical skills are crucial to your organization’s development. However, it doesn’t mean you should overlook the importance of identifying and developing soft skills in the workplace. Areas like communication, time management, active listening, and delegation are all considered non-technical, but fostering those can significantly help increase productivity not just for an individual, but the team as a whole.
It pays to take a step back to determine which soft skills can contribute to the success of your small business as a whole. From there, you can provide training and development courses that could make those skills tangible. For example, you can hold interactive workshops where you can simulate scenarios to observe how your team would handle the situation. You can also come up with inter-departmental training programs that are also helpful in fostering camaraderie, internal communications, and teamwork.
- Monitor and measure everyone’s progress
Learning and development programs are an investment that should aim to yield good returns, even for small enterprises like yours. In this case, the return you’re expecting comes in the form of your employees being able to apply what they’ve learned from the courses and training you’ve provided. Aside from encouraging the team to learn and develop, they should also be motivated to apply and practice what they’ve learned.
Ensuring that employees understand the connections between their learning, performance, and output, as well as constantly checking in with them is an excellent approach to guarantee that they begin integrating what they have learned into their job roles. Their learning and development goals, job responsibilities, and career paths must all be clearly aligned.
Through monitoring and measuring, you can determine how the learning and development strategy you’re implementing impacts your employees. Additionally, it allows you to tweak and adapt your tactics based on your organization’s needs. Most importantly, the measurement will let you discover if your approach could improve your company’s flexibility.
The takeaway
Fostering a culture that gives emphasis to learning and development is crucial in any industry. Your team should be no exemption, especially if your goal is to grow and scale it effectively. This is especially true for small businesses, where both flexibility and adaptation are crucial to your company’s success.
Authored by Jamie Sterling
Jamie Sterling is an organizational development specialist. She has been helping various organizations increase their efficiency through educational seminars and guest posts. In her free time, Jamie enjoys reading and traveling.
References:
- “5 steps to help your employees adopt new software”, Source: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/5-steps-to-help-your-employees-adopt-new-software/
- “5 Ways to Foster Learning in Your Workplace”, Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/243965
- “7 Ways to Support Employee Growth and Professional Development”, Source: https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/support-professional-development/
- “The How-To: Fostering A Learning Environment In Your Enterprise”, Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/336312