How to train your team: top team training tips from successful small business owners

Having a hard time with employee training at your small business? It’s understandable with all the responsibilities on your plate, but neglecting proper onboarding can be detrimental to your business in the long term. 

According to the Association for Talent Development (ATD), companies that offer comprehensive training programs have 218% higher income per employee than companies without formalized training. 

If you’re looking to improve your approach, why not seek advice from successful small business owners? The owners of Square Pie Guys and Scentcerely Yours have generously shared their effective training strategies to help you establish a solid team training program for your employees.

Here are their top tips for training news employees. 

Top tips for training new employees

1. Get new team members as excited as you are

Danny Stoller of Square Pie Guys not only believes in great pizza but also in getting team members excited from day one: 

We’re genuinely excited and grateful for every single person that chooses to work with us. In the industry, it’s really hard to find talent. So, it’s very important to us that everyone gets that excitement from their manager.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how we can build that aspect into our onboarding checklist. For instance, the checklist includes a bio about the founders that they go through to better understand our passion. But making sure that the managers who are onboarding them have that as their true north, and their goal too, is a huge priority.

Prioritize building excitement and appreciation for new hires from day one. By incorporating personal touches like bios about your company’s founders, and ensuring employees are enthusiastic and passionate about onboarding, new hires are more likely to feel engaged and committed to your team. 

This approach can help you attract and retain top talent in a competitive job market.

2. Train new employees by putting them in the customer’s position

Rob and Susi Brucato of Scentcerely Yours says that instead of hopping right into formal training, they give their new team members a chance to experience their business from the other side:

The first thing Susi does is make the new employee the customer. They hear the process from Susi’s perspective as an employee, because ultimately that’s how they’re going to be communicating when they start to deal with customers. 

So, it’s not just us regurgitating. Instead, we show them what we say. We tell them that Susi’s going to be the employee and to pick up on things that she said, because that’s ultimately how you’re going to explain the experience to the customer.  

We see them go through the process, sit down, and make the candle — and we get to see their excitement, their involvement, right from the start. I really feel like Susi does a great job getting the employees fired up from the beginning when they come in as a customer and experience it firsthand. 

I think that’s a huge thing we do on the front end that puts them at ease. It’s not like they’re coming into this and I’m going throw a bunch of stuff at them. They get to relax, be the customer and enjoy the experience. Then, we’ll just start to talk about some of the parts of the process. It’s very effective.

Having new team members experience your business from a customer’s perspective can be a very effective training strategy. This helps new hires gain valuable insight into how your business works, and can help them better communicate with customers in the future. 

This approach creates a comfortable and relaxed learning environment, which can lead to engaged and invested team members.

3. Give the right guidance  

A little guidance goes a long way, says Danny: 

‘Prior preparation prevents poor performance’ is like the mantra of a pizza station. You have to come correct, and then you just execute. If you don’t, you find yourself falling behind really quickly. So, we have a trainer who is showing them how to do it the first day and observing the second day — sort of like a guided execution.  

On the third day, they start to be on their own, and on the fourth and fifth days, they’re basically solo with their station partner. But at the end of it, there’s a quiz. And in that, the trainer says, ‘you’re good to go,’ or ‘hey, we need to spend a little bit more time on this.’

Providing guidance and preparation for new hires is key. This can be in the form of a guided execution approach, where a trainer shows new hires how to do their job and observes them over consecutive days. 

Employees learn to work independently faster this way, and a quiz at the end helps assess their understanding and identify areas where they may need further training.This keeps them current and sharp on your business procedures. 

4. Expand their perspectives  

Not only do Rob and Susi provide the customer perspective, but they also make sure the employee gets the opportunity to build their own style based on how everyone else operates: 

We give the new employees exposure to all the other team members as soon as possible, and not just by having them introduce themselves. We let the new employee shadow all of our other team members — somebody who’s been here six months, somebody who’s been here a year, somebody who’s been here for three years — because it puts them at ease. 

I think this prevents the employees from thinking, ‘okay, Susi’s telling me this, I have to do it exactly the way Susi tells me, or I’m not doing a good job.’ It’s, ‘hey, here’s the whole team of people. Work with everybody, get exposure to everybody, pick up bits and pieces from everybody and then just make it your style.’

I think giving the employees exposure right from the beginning to everybody makes them feel less inundated. It instills confidence in the new employee that we have a great team of people. We trust everybody. Everybody does it differently. There’s no one right way to do this. You tweak it, you make it your style. 

And again, I think that just helps to get people to buy in from the beginning, feel less intimidated by it, excited about it, and know that they can put their spin on it — make it their own.

Help new employees build confidence and find their own working style by providing exposure to different team members early on. Let new hires shadow different team members to learn from their unique approaches. Research shows that job shadowing can help employees build trust 

This approach instills confidence, encourages creativity, and can help your employees feel less overwhelmed by the training process.

Train all new employees on all roles  

Exposing everyone to all areas of training is key, says Danny: 

If you’re a general manager, you actually go through every single hourly training certification. Then you go through the shift lead training before the general manager training. With that, what we’re able to do is build a knowledge base. As your responsibility increases, you accumulate the knowledge with it.  

Everyone has to be able to tap into a given role if needed. Theoretically, managers support a team that’s doing that work — and they’re not doing the work themselves. If you think of a pyramid of knowledge, you go from these specific chunks of knowledge to oversight. And our process is very logical and iterative. 

Our goal is to one day hire someone on as a dishwasher — and three years later, they’re a GM. That would be the best-in-class scenario. 

Foster a culture of learning by having employees go through different training modules for different roles. This helps new employees gain knowledge as they take on more responsibilities, which helps them be more versatile and grow faster. 

Managers can then support their team without doing the work themselves, creating a pyramid of knowledge that fosters career development.

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Onboarding new employees can feel like a daunting task. With Homebase HR, getting new hires prepped and ready for the job is a breeze. 

Homebase helps simplify your onboarding process by sending your new hires an easy-to-use welcome packet, allowing them to complete paperwork electronically before starting their job. We’ll securely store their information right in Homebase, freeing up your time to focus on training.