Buife Nomeh: 5 Essential Training Employees in SMEs Need

As a small business owner, you most likely have to operate your business on a smaller budget than big companies, and an even smaller team. This means you have to flex more muscle in the highly competitive market to not only stay in, but also scale your business. To achieve this, you have to invest in training your staff to maximize their potential and significantly increase their output. Whether you have staff strength of 2, 5, 10 or 50 in your small business, the following training will empower and equip your staff to deliver results that would help you progressively seize portions of the market:

Onboarding Training

New hire training is vital for your small business growth. It’s your opportunity to get to know your new employees, and them, you. It is also a great time to set your new hires up for success in their new role. Every business is unique, therefore, a proper orientation to your business vision, mission, goals, important policies and procedures, and workplace culture will help your new team members adjust faster to their roles and colleagues.

Customer Service Training

Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, once said, “There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down simply by spending his money somewhere else.” The mistake many micro business owners make is solely assuming the role of customer relationship. But that isn’t helpful to your business success. Even if you have a team of two people (including you), the work the other individual does directly and indirectly affect the overall customer experience. Therefore, customer service training is important. Secondly, your goal is for your business to grow and be able to hire more people. Providing customer service training would help in shaping a company culture where the customer is perceived and treated like the boss.

Communication Skills Training

In between teams, projects and functions, your employees communicate daily with each other, you and sometimes, external stakeholders. Studies have shown that poor employee communication skills can lead to workplace conflict, misunderstanding among colleagues and with clients, and missed deadlines. These negatively impact your bottom line. A training on effective oral and written communication skills for your employees will go a long way in ensuring that everyone is on the ‘same page’.

Productivity Training

To achieve your business goals, everyone on your team needs to be productive. This means making more progress in less time. But productivity isn’t just about time management, it’s also about energy management. Good productivity training will help your employees be results-oriented in the use of their time and energy. They will gain the knowledge and skills needed to be efficient in the use of every resource available to them.

Tech/IT Training

Speaking of efficiency and productivity, technology is a great resource for achieving both. Even if your business is not in the Tech sector, you can benefit a whole lot from leveraging ICT. From saving costs by issuing e-receipts, and time by using emails for some internal communications, to attracting new business and ensuring prompt customer support via your website and social media accounts, the merits are endless. So, an investment in IT training for your employees is an investment in your bottom line.

According to Steve Wynn, “human resources isn’t the thing we do. It is the thing that runs our business.” As a small business owner, view your employees as your most important assets. Thus, just like you invest in machines, tools and other resources that are critical to running your business, you should invest thrice as more in developing the people whose responsibility it is to work with those tools and machines.

Over to you, business owners, what other training have you provided for your employees and would recommend? As an employee, what type of training would you like your employer to provide for you and your team?

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