I’m working on a new tool to help business owners get better results when they train their employees. For me, building a tool like this means going back to the very basics of what an employee might need to do in the course of their work, and consequently what they might need to be trained on. In thinking about this, I’ve come to the conclusion that every element of any job can be categorized as either a task or a decision.
Tasks are pretty obvious, I think. Ringing up a sale is a task. Booking an appointment is a task. Writing this blog post is a task. Tasks are actions that can be broken down into a series of steps that are the same every time, or maybe a flowchart with a few simple “If A then X; if B then Y” branches. As such, tasks are also the easiest elements of a job to train someone on and the easiest elements to evaluate someone on.
“You didn’t get the result you wanted because you skipped step 3.”
Decisions, though? That gets more complicated. Decisions are a judgement call, and they require an understanding of context and subtle nuance. As an employer, what you really want from an employee is to make the same decisions that you would make in the same situation. That’s more easily said than achieved, however.
This is what I am contemplating now. What goes into training someone to make the “right” decision? Thoughts? Share them in the comments!