Management • Section 10
Training In The Midst Of COVID (Sharon Pallas, director of training, Universal Storage Group) Our team trains anywhere across the United States at our 70-plus stores, never hesitating to pack our bags and jump in the car or on the plane to fulfill our goal of “providing our employees with the tools to be successful storage managers.”
Well, that was the way until the pandemic! Priding our-
selves on always assessing the job at hand and figuring out what to do, we immediately started on a new game plan: Zoom training.
Zoom was not new to us, but we had only used it for
meetings and not for training a new employee as that is normally a two-week process: Phase I with one of our certi- fied trainers and Phase II “shadowing” one of our seasoned managers. Not being experts on Zoom, it was challenging!
The Easy Part:
• Our trainers took a day and learned the ins and outs of Zoom to move forward quickly.
• Training our software program, SiteLink, was relatively easy through Zoom as we were able to share screen and give our trainees control of our remote to work through paperless leasing, payments, move-outs, etc., in our test site.
• Our operating processes, unique to USG, was also easy to train as we use Dropbox throughout the company for everything from processing vendor invoices to inputting income and tracking goals.
• Amazingly, we could even practice some customer service skills by role playing telephone answering and customer problem solving.
The Challenges:
• Even adults have trouble focusing for long periods of time just sitting in front of the computer.
• We had to adjust the time frame of training from a full eight hours of training per day to five to six hours with two breaks and a lunch period. This extended our normal training period of five days/40 hours for Phase I of our program.
• It was harder to determine if our new hire was suited for the job and as we weren’t observing them in the facility environment.
• We could not train them on how to clean a unit, check the property, or any outside site functions by “hands on” as we normally do when we are conducting on-site training.
• The trainee did not have any hands-on practice with real customers until Phase II of training when they were shadowing a manager; normally, they would have been working with actual customers on Day 3 of Phase I.
2021 Self-Storage Almanac 99
What Did We Learn? Even though it was difficult, we’ve successfully trained 10 new employees so far with our new method. But most im- portant, we witnessed the resiliency of our training team, as they conquered each new challenge successfully and continued to provide our employees with the tools to be successful without missing a beat.
And as one of our senior trainers, Sharon Morgan wrote,
“Training managers for careers in the self-storage industry has been challenging during this contactless, social distanc- ing, mask-wearing era. While online meeting platforms offer much in the way of allowing trainers to impart information and keep staff up-to-date on the latest techniques, it does not replace the invaluable in-person, hands-on method which allows assessment of a trainee’s customer relation- ship skills and abilities.”
What’s Included? What’s Not? Here you may find a wide variety of services that are inclusive, while other companies may charge separate fees for these same services. Such intricacies would include invoicing of cus- tomers monthly via email for a fee paid by the customer by the on-site manager or via USPS by outside contractors. About half of management companies conduct auctions/lien sales in house using online auction websites, while the other half had a combination of in-house auctions and auctioneers conducting sales. Marketing plans are prepared and enacted. Most man- agement companies operate under various store names, while others operate all sites under their own brand and logo with ad- ditional fees charged to the owner for signage on the site with its flag and paint and/or door colors. This can result in addition- al licensing or franchise fees. Most management companies are involved in new store designs. The level of involvement ranges from minimal to extensive design work by the company. There may be additional fees for these planning services. The best out- come is for management to be involved from the day the dirt is purchased. There is so much to be handled while the site is being built, and this involvement allows the management team to open a new site with all details prepared and ready to go:
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