Your business no doubt competes in an ever-changing and fast-paced work environment amidst a flurry of technological advances that add even more pressure to achieving bottom-line results. As a business manager or team leader, you must expect your team to rise to ambitious expectations, which means your team members must constantly hone and update their skill sets to meet the ever-growing demands of customers.
All of this places premium importance on effective team training sessions so your company can stay ahead of the competition and satisfy bottom-line needs. But what makes for successful team training? How should you even approach training your team, and how can you be sure your team receives optimal benefits from a training session?
What is Team Training?
Team training is a type of training that departments or business teams complete to increase their skill sets, with the ultimate objective for employees to perform their job tasks with greater proficiency. Team training sessions vary in duration based on the needs identified by the team leader or manager.
Among the reasons to have a team training are introducing new business software, the development of new products or services, improving customer service, or the need to acquire new technical skills in areas such as accounting, marketing, or human resources.
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 7 Tips for Successful Team Training
1) Identify How Your Team Members Prefer to Learn
There is no one right way to run a team training. You have to customize it to fit the needs of your team members’ learning styles. It is helpful to keep in mind the diverse ways each employee takes in information, which is why it is important to present theories and techniques in a way that resonates with their learning styles.
For example, you will have team members who like hands-on training and others who prefer instructor-led classroom training. You may find you have employees who want to explore a single topic for the day. As you can see, training your team effectively means catering to the learning needs of your team, as well as fostering open communication with your direct reports.
2) Seek Your Team’s Input When Identifying Needs
The ideal way to figure out which training initiatives to use to train your team is by soliciting feedback from your team members. They may tell you they need certain topics covered that address adjusting to a new software program, insights into performing at a higher rate of efficiency in product development, or something as simple as communicating more effectively with other team members.
Look for a consensus when it comes to the topics that emerge, and select a topic that would be highly valuable to explore and that will lead to maximum retention.
3) Create a Training Schedule that is in Sync with Department Activities
When you are searching for available times to train your team, consider creating a training schedule that ensures your team has enough time to learn new skills. For example, if the busiest days for your marketing team are Tuesdays and Fridays, then you could schedule training sessions for Mondays and Wednesdays.
You might also schedule team training later in the morning or the early afternoon to give team members adequate time to begin the workday.
4) Mix Lecture-Style Training with Group Activities
If you want to ensure that you will engage your team and hold their interest, try balancing the learning formats of lecture and team activities. For example, for the first half an hour, you might have a lecture with a PowerPoint presentation that highlights specific techniques for learning new customer service software.
After the presentation, you could create teams of four employees each to run through the steps of mastering the new software. Then, bring the groups back together to talk about customer interaction scenarios and answer their questions.
5) Create an Educational Document to Emphasize Key Takeaways from Training Session
As a way to assist each team member in remembering the information you covered in the team training, come up with a summary of major talking points. Also, address questions with answers that employees can use in their jobs right away. You will also want to review the topics that were covered during the team training.
Make presentations available after training your team so each team member can review the key takeaways and apply what they learned practically in their job functions more effectively. It is always a good idea to make available concise, informative materials that team members can hold onto after their training session.
6) Distribute Anonymous Email Surveys & Encourage Feedback from Team Members
After you train your team, make sure to send out an anonymous email survey to gauge how much your team members learned. Be sure to include the topics you covered during the training session.
You then take their scores, determine how successful a training session was, and make adjustments for next time. You may include in your survey a section that requests training participants to rate the training session and provide ideas for ways the training could be improved.
7) Evaluate Team Performance to Determine the Success of Training
After you have trained your team, measure the success of the training by later evaluating the performance levels of each team participant. For example, maybe you held two training sessions to teach your team members how to use new accounting software. Compare the previous performance to the current performance of your team members after the training session.
Once you have compared the former performance to the current performance of your accounting team, you may discover that the training increased productivity by 20 percent and lessened mistakes by another 10 percent with the implementation of the new software.
Hold Your Team Training Sessions at a Burbity Workspaces Meeting Room
At Burbity Workspaces, we have well-appointed meeting rooms that would serve as a perfect setting for team training for your business. If you would rather hold your team training away from the workplace, then we invite you to consider Burbity Workspaces for your next team training.
