How Employee Workshops Can Help Your Small Business
There comes a time for every small business when either new standard operating procedures need to be introduced or specific issues within the team need to be addressed. Although some information on company guidelines and expectations can be passed to your staff through memos, one of the best ways to ensure that your team is completely on the same page is to facilitate internal workshops. Workshops can be structured in various ways, but essentially, they are opportunities for management to relay information to all of the employees at once, and to get direct feedback from the staff. Employee training and development workshops can be great learning experiences for everyone involved, but they can also provide the following three benefits for your small business:
Improved Customer Service
One of the most critical skills every team member that interacts with customers should have is “people skills”. Even if customers are satisfied with the service or product your small business provides, most will not return or refer if they have had a bad experience with your staff. How your customers feel after they interact with your employees is crucial to the health of your small business. Long after your service has ended or your product has been utilized, customers will remember how you made them feel.
Employee training and development in this area will not only help your staff meet customer needs by quickly delivering the services or goods they desire, but it can also equip your team with the skills they need to manage tense situations. As we all know, training in this area is essential because those tense moments are the moments when customer service is tested the most! Those moments can make or break a relationship with a customer, so taking the time to equip your staff to handle them appropriately can make all the difference in the retention of customers for your small business.
Increased Product Knowledge
When you visit a restaurant, you should be able to ask the wait staff specific questions about any item on the menu, and they should be able to give you a well-informed answer about the item. How are they able to do this? Most restaurants require that their wait staff taste everything on the menu, as they’re given information about what they’re eating. This level of interaction with the food helps the staff retain more sensory-based information about the dishes as opposed to merely memorizing the menu.
Likewise, workshops can be the perfect opportunities for small businesses to allow their employees to have hands-on experiences with their products. In this dedicated time and space, your staff can closely examine, interact with, and use your product. If your small business provides a service, you can also use this time to practice mock trials of the service or go through all of the pros and cons with your staff to help them better anticipate what your customers’ experiences might be like. One of the biggest bonuses in this type of workshop is the free feedback you can get from your staff on what they like or don’t like about the product/service. You all can work together as a team to ensure that whatever you’re offering the customer is something you would use yourselves.
Greater Productivity and Quality of Work
Sometimes employee workshops are necessary simply to keep your employees motivated. In some aspects, every business strives to reach a point where a routine is established, but there are times that routine can become mundane, and when the workplace becomes mundane, employees inevitably become bored and uninterested in work. It goes without saying, but when your employees aren’t motivated to do their best work, there is a huge decrease in employee productivity and quality of work.
Once you have observed your work environment and identified the factors that are causing issues with productivity and employee motivation, come up with ways to address those issues during an employee workshop. You can put together team-building activities or introduce special challenges that can be applied to some of the most mundane tasks. For instance, if inputting data seems to be killing your employees’ motivation, use the workshop to give them tips on how they can save time, and then offer rewards for the team members that implement the new strategies and meet milestones. You’d be amazed at the renewed zeal your employees will find for work once they leave the workshop.
In order to make the most of your employee training and development workshops, you must spend a good amount of time planning. Tuxedo Impressions LLC™ offers signature workshops that are designed to provide your small business with the tools and resources you need to establish efficiency in your organization. For more information on how we can partner with your small business, contact us today.
~Jamara Wilson, Team Tuxedo Impressions LLC™
