Two tips for effective employee training when you’re on a budget
How can you improve your team’s performance on the retail floor when you’ve got zero time and a tight budget? The chaotic life of retail often leaves you with little time to focus on proactive improvement and skill building for your sales associates. But continuous employee development is critical for the retailer who intends to build an effective sales team. Here are two quick ways to train your employees in the art of retail – when you’re on a budget.
Leverage Strong Employees for
On-the-Job Shadowing
In most companies, job shadowing is a technique that allows a new employee to learn their role. The employee follows an experienced employee and learns the tasks and responsibilities required to perform their job. This can be an effective way to conduct on-the-job training. But job shadowing doesn’t have to be limited to training new employees. You can use short-term job shadowing to expose employees to different functions during various shifts within the company.
Better performing sales employees can help less adept employees improve their skills by observing their interactions with a customer and providing constructive feedback. Exercises like these will help them understand the value proposition of your brand and understand what is important to your customers.
And the shadow experience doesn’t have to take a long time. Even a few hours of observation and practice can lead to a better understanding and better skill in engaging customers. When employees develop working relationships with employees in other shifts, they begin to communicate, connect different resources together, and create new approaches to problem solving.
Replicate External Training Opportunities
Sometimes, all it takes to help your employees be more effective on the sales floor is to help them develop a better understanding of the software you use to run your retail store. External training opportunities like the two-week Retail Pro training are good ways to help employees use the robust functionality more effectively. However, very often only a handful of employees will ultimately get the benefit of attending an official training.
So ask the few who attend the training to present what they’ve learned to the rest of your employees. Knowing that they will later present the information to their retail peers will motivate your employee delegate to listen actively and work hard to process and retain the course material. If more than one person attends the training, you can ask the entire group to work together and prepare a presentation. For trainings longer than a day or two, you may ask the employees to only prepare a high-level overview of session materials.
By holding several peer-training mini-seminars during various shifts, your entire company can benefit from the material that was presented, and training attendees will reinforce their own newly-gained knowledge by virtue of repetition and cognitively processing it for presentations.
Supporting initiatives like these to allow employees to develop both personally and professionally is critical, and Retail Pro University is happy to partner with you in doing so. Contact us at training@retailpro.com to learn about training options for your employees.
