A Good Start

Get more mileage from your orientation and training programs.

By Lucretia DiSanto Jones

Do you want to avoid having ho-hum employees? Of course you do. Then set the right tone for your practice’s orientation and training programs, say Susan Drake, Sara Roberts and Michelle Gulman, authors of Light Their Fire: Using Internal Marketing to Ignite Employee Performance and WOW Your Customers.

From the start
“Orientation is your firm’s best opportunity to really communicate well to your employees,” says Roberts. “They are never going to be more excited than the day they start at your firm, so it is an opportunity to share your vision and help clearly articulate a roadmap for what your company is trying to accomplish, what your role in it is, what their role in it is, and how you are going to help them succeed in it.

“Training can be used to help you get buy-in from your employees and help them be more successful in their roles,” Roberts adds.

IF YOU DON’T MAKE YOUR EMPLOYEES A PRIORITY, IT ALMOST ALWAYS SHOWS THROUGH TO YOUR CUSTOMER.

Prep work
You must, however, get your act together before any orientation or training program begins.

“You want to make sure before you develop any type of training or orientation that you understand the objectives you want to accomplish. Decide exactly what you want the outcome to be,” says Roberts “not something vague like, ‘I want my employees to be enthusiastic.’”

If you don’t clearly communicate your objectives, Roberts warns, your employees won’t necessarily know how to make things happen.

Cascading strategy
One technique that some large corporations use to drive home what employees need to do to be successful and help meet the firm’s goals is the cascading strategy. Roberts explains how Gap Inc., owner of the Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic brands, uses the cascading strategy and how it can work for smaller employers like insurance and financial advisors: “Gap Inc.’s orientation is not just one big day. It’s actually a series of days. They have an overall organization-wide orientation. Then employees move onto a brand-level orientation. Then they go to a department-level orientation, then to a role-specific orientation. A financial planner can give an overall goals-and-objectives orientation. Then he can give an orientation on what an employee’s specific role is and its context within the firm. From there, he can develop specific goals and objectives that will help the employee” successfully fill his specific role.

This approach, Roberts explains, helps keep employees from being stranded, so to speak. “It’s nice to be able to cascade down so employees aren’t saying, probably to themselves, ‘I know the vision, but I don’t know how to execute it.’”

Did it work?
Once you’ve drilled down and provided specific guidance for employees to use to get the job done, you need to make sure the message is getting through. In other words, you must evaluate what you’ve just done.

“Within any good training program, there are various levels of evaluation. No. 1, you want to make sure you evaluate the overall general effectiveness of your program,” says Roberts. While you can use the traditional paper surveys, she suggests you also take it to the next level by actually testing the employee.

“Have a practice, a skill check, so you can say that they are able to actually translate it into behavior and can do something with it,” she adds. For example, after an advisor has an orientation or training with an administrative assistant, a receptionist, a customer service representative or even a junior agent, he could stage a role-playing scenario. The new employee actually acts out working with a customer, says Roberts, “so you can observe their behaviors. Then you can easily measure whether or not they were able to perform.” It would also help employees get rid of any jitters before real calls start to come in.

“Being able to take it a step further and actually practice is important, so when the rubber meets the road they’re able to actually perform well. And because you’ve set them up for success, they feel so much better about you as an employer,” says Roberts.

Make employees a priority
Advisors must make the effort to light a fire under their employees. “If you don’t make your employees a priority, how can you really expect them to make your customers feel like they are a priority?” asks Roberts. “If you focus on your employees, you will have better consistency and service delivery to your customers. Employee loyalty leads to customer loyalty.”