FOCUS: TRAINING Shopfloor
December 2024 / January 2025
ertonline.co.uk
5 key steps to planning your staff training in 2025
Training. We all know it would be great to do more of it, but how do you allocate time for quality training when the retail calendar pushes through the year like a juggernaut and there are staff holidays, sicknesses and the endless cycle of seasonal promotions to cover? The answer – planning!
By Paul Laville | Director, T21 Group
Every business is different and you’ll know what is and isn’t possible with your staff and business commitments. But if you spend time planning out your training, you’ll find it easier to work it into your calendar and you’ll stand more chance of getting the best return from it. So, here are five great tips to help you start planning for your staff training programme in 2025…
1: Define your objectives and goals Simply, what do you want the training to achieve and why? Do you want to improve your staff’s product knowledge, enhance their sales techniques and increase their conversion rates to increase turnover and profitability? Do you want your staff to improve their communication skills and their problem-solving abilities? Is it about being more efficient with your business operations? Write it all down so that you have clear goals. If there are too many goals, then prioritise the most urgent and important.
2: Assess your training needs This is where you discover the skills and/or operational gaps that need filling so that you can achieve the goals you listed. Setting up ‘mystery shopping’ visits can highlight any shortfalls in customer communication and selling skills, but don’t leave your staff out of the loop; we often combine a mystery shop audit with a questionnaire for staff to complete which asks them what they feel their strengths and weaknesses are. This enables us to understand your training needs from three perspectives: what your business needs in order to grow, what your customers are missing out on, and what your staff want to achieve.
3: Create the training programme Allocate enough time to get the training done properly and give it the budget it needs. If you’re working with an outside training company then give them all the information they need so that they can work with you to create and implement the programme.
Think about how you can bring energy into the training – how to get people off their seats and working together. Think about e-learning too; blending relevant online courses with your interactive group workshops can be extremely effective in reinforcing key learning points.
4: Complete the training programme This may sound obvious, but it is important to ensure that everyone who starts the training programme actually completes it! Also, ensure you give your staff the freedom to focus on the training while they’re doing it. This means freeing them up entirely from their day-to-day duties; if they’re distracted by interruptions from customers or other staff members then you’ll be wasting all your efforts so far.
5: Evaluate the training Was your training a success? Has it helped plug the skills gaps and are these beginning to help the business achieve the goals you set out earlier? If any part of the training was online then you should have access to reports showing who engaged with the training and completed the courses and so on. The big advantage of this ‘hard data’ is that you can use it alongside other data sets to see where the training had an impact. For example, did those who completed a sales course see an uplift in their sales out? For face-to-face training it’s a little more subjective, but you can still use surveys and feedback forms to help evaluate the effectiveness of your training programme.
The final step: Keep it going! Training should not be seen as a one-hit, one-fix solution to all your problems. If you can establish a culture of continuous learning and development, then your staff are more likely to engage with training more positively and be more willing and able to hone their skills as your business grows and evolves. In this way, training is more likely to provide the key building blocks to helping your business become more efficient and profitable for the longer term.
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