On a recent trip, we were stuck on the plane a little longer than expected because the Northwest Airlines gate agent , a trainee we learned – had trouble moving the jet way up to the aircraft and then could not get the door of the aircraft to open completely. As I was sitting on the flight , somewhat impatiently (OK, very impatiently. You road warriors know what I am talking about) , I started thinking about this notion of employee training and about how and when to do it.
I think we can make two basic distinctions in training programs. First, there is the classroom or online session where a trainer (or the computer) presents new information and where there may or may not be “practice sessions. An example is when a new email system gets rolled out at a company and everyone goes through the tutorial at their workstation or in a training room and then practices what they’ve learned at a terminal. Second, there is the real time training where an experienced someone shows a newbie how to do their new job. We often see this form of training in customer service or high customer contact situations. For example, in a restaurant an experienced server “shadows a new server and explains and coaches them along to get them to the point where he/she can wait on tables alone.
I think we would all agree that the worst thing an employer can do is to throw a new employee into the “deep end of the pool. That is, expect the new person to perform at the level of an experienced one without appropriate training.
However, in the domain of real time training, I really wonder if employers think through the best time to do this kind of training in a way that will not unduly annoy the customers that are waiting to be served while the learning occurs.
Based on years of anecdotal observations, I would say that a number of organizations give very little thought to the timing of the training. Time and again, I see new employees getting the real time training during peak business hours with little sensitivity to the growing lines of customers waiting for service because the newbie is in learning mode. My favorite example was in an airport security line during the holiday peak travel season. The TSA person screening carry on luggage was a trainee. This person stopped the conveyor line for EVERY bag and bin that passed though the x-ray machine, pointed to an area on the screen that seemed suspicious to the trainee, then asked the supervisor if it was OK to let the bag pass. You can imagine that just a few minutes of this behavior would result in an enormous line of impatient travelers. I do not fault the trainee at all. My beef is with the supervisor who was so intent on the training process that he was clueless about the negative impact this situation was having on the customers in line and took no corrective action , like taking on the screening himself and talking the trainee through the process until there was a less busy time.
Yes, I know, many of you are probably saying, “it’s a government program, what do you expect. Maybe. But I have seen this kind of lack of awareness on the part of training supervisors in check out lines and customer service settings of large national companies including and airline (where two supervisors actually gave contradictory instructions to a trainee), a department store (where the supervisor left the trainee on her own only to have the trainee make repeated requests for assistance), and a hotel chain (where the new night front desk clerk had apparently received little training before his first night on the job).
So training supervisors of the world, here’s what needs to be present in the way you work. First continue to provide the best possible training to people who will be in customer contact positions before you let them on their own. Second, put up a sign or some other designation to show the person with whom you are working is a trainee. That way, customers can make a choice about the line they choose to enter. The Fairmont Hotels do a great job of this in training their front desk people. What they also do is have the supervisor never leave the side of the trainee so that if a complicated situation arises, or if the lines get too long, they can step in to handle the tough problem and/or get the lines moving again while using that time as a teachable moment.