While in-house training is an essential part of managing and improving your team, it’s also true that there are practical skills they need you cannot train or provide. It might be that helping your team adapt to the latest practical thinking in their industry, finding a cohesive business consultancy approach dedicated to squeezing productivity out of your office, or helping a dysfunctional team come back to health will require a more promising approach.
This means that finding dedicated providers can be important. Knowing what to look for when searching for said services is crucial. After all, a somewhat ineffective service can not only be a waste of an investment, but their offered advice may conflict with better, newer providers you decide to opt for instead.
In the following advice, you’ll learn how to get the most from your training providers, to help your team flourish in the midst of a fast-paced and continually changing industry.
Vet Those Services
It’s easy to be impressed by the programme offered by a select firm, service or consultant, but are they, in actual fact, going to offer those services? Reading service reviews and customer testimonials can be a good idea, provided they are listed through a third party service. Businesses will cherry-pick testimonials to suit their needs, and so to a certain degree they cannot be relied upon. Look for reviews that encompass case studies, such as a team becoming 5-10% more effective during the holiday rush thanks to the advice gained.
Additionally, opt for services that offer constructive feedback. ‘Life coach’ or ‘motivational’ services may seem good on the surface, but they hardly offer anything outside of a motivational pep talk. This can be valuable for some teams, but practical skills and the measures in which to apply them will always yield more insight than flowery language offered by a charismatic individual.
Value vs. Statistics
It’s also important to consider how values are important to a firm. Not all firms practice these values, despite believing that they do. A training provider with a proposal of increasing integrity, of improving customer relationships, of building better B2B networks should offer this advice through the lens of practical decision making, but also in how that translates to the firm itself. This way you get all the idealistic benefit of the ‘business coach’ with all of the practical necessities related to your industry. For example, taking the time to deliver on promises, to remain impartial despite success or failure, to learn from each step forward will be practical advice a team could readily learn, while also impacting their new pursuit going forward.
Healing Dysfunctional Teams
If your team is dysfunctional, it’s important to get to the heart of the issue and clearly understand what the problem may be. Healing the rifts between people is more of a job for your HR team, but what if your HR is dysfunctional too? It might be that lessening the blaming culture that has arisen and encouraging personal responsibility is a lesson sorely needed. This can go deeper than the simple advice or experience offered by team building activities, although these can help non-communicative teams feel comfortable around one another again.
What’s The Result?
So far, we have explored the theory of training and improvement. However, none of this is worthwhile without the pursuit of actionable goals aimed at possible results. This is how a firm will really improve, and it’s crucial for all managers and decision-makers in your brand to understand that.
Perhaps a training provider is happy to get your team up to standard relating to the latest health and safety practice and legislation. But do they also have a goal of decreasing your workplace injuries by 25% minimum? Can they teach you new methods of error reporting, or of ensuring vital issues are reported and thus prevented in consequence?
Always ask yourself ‘what’s the result?’ This can help you decide what actionable processes are important for your team to learn. After all, we can all sit in a circle and pat ourselves on the back or vaguely commit to goals, but it’s the structural changes that make the difference.
SMART goals, that is those that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Targeted can help any team feel as though they’re on the right track again. You will also fully measure the competency of your changes provided you keep those metrics to heart.
With this advice, we hope you’ll feel much more confident in selecting a training provider or business training company for the improvement of your team.