Have you ever cleaned out a closet? Or an entire wardrobe? You dump everything out on the floor, and when you can see everything you have, then you can start to sort, look for patterns, and make decisions. When you’re done, you have a well organized closet that only contains the items that really work for you.
This is one of the benefits of a training audit.
This process starts with brainstorming about what you want to fix. With a closet, you might feel like you can’t find anything, or nothing looks good on you anymore, or there is just way too much stuff. With your business, you might feel like you and your employees are reinventing the wheel over and over. It might take months getting a new employee trained. You might be constantly correcting mistakes and answering questions for employees who are already (supposedly) trained.
Being clear on what your pain points are leads to clarity on the transformation you want. You’ll know what you want out of your cleaned closet and out of your streamlined business.
Then comes the messy part.
In the closet analogy, we dumped everything on the floor. For your business, we go through job descriptions, employee evaluation forms, any and all existing training materials, and a good old fashioned brain dump to create a list of every expectation you have of your employees. (If you want, you could expand this “cleanout” to include a list of every expectation you have of yourself in your business.) This is the part where it is most valuable to have an outside pair of eyes. You can make lists all day, but it is an outsider who will notice the gaps and the assumptions.
The ostensible point of all this is to create training protocols that are as efficient and effective as you can be managed. However, much like a closet reorganization that leads to bags for the thrift store, a training audit can lead to simplifications and improvements for the systems and processes that make your business run.
When was the last time you cleaned out your business closet?