19 May The Train-the-Trainer Way: Developing a highly motivated and capable cleaning workforce
What is the Train-the-Trainer Way?
To keep your business or organisation running your cleaning staff must be adaptable, efficient, and responsive to the demands of both the organisation and your customers. For your cleaning staff to meet these requirements, they must acquire the specific knowledge and skills through training to perform well in their jobs. However, acquiring the knowledge and skills in just one training session is not enough, there must be a culture of on-going and continuous training to create and develop the very best potential out of all cleaning staff.
How do you make sure that you have the capability and capacity to effectively training all cleaning staff on an on-going basis, across a range of different skills to meet your needs? By making skilled cleaners and supervisors capable of teaching their colleagues via the Train-the-Trainer way.
The train-the-trainer way is a method for training a selection of cleaning staff to enable them to train other cleaners or new cleaners in their organisation.
For example, A cleaner supervisor who is experienced and skilled in meeting customers during that crucial first meeting wants to train other cleaners in customer care and communication when they interact with customers. The supervisor learns how to become a trainer and uses those new skills to create and deliver a series of training sessions to the other cleaners.
In larger organisations this can be further extended by the newly trained supervisor (in the train-the-trainer way) training a select group of people in customer care and communication and simultaneously teaching them how to train others.
The benefits of the Train-the-Trainer way
The key advantage of the train-the-trainer way is its effectiveness to disseminate the right skills and knowledge to the right people at the right time within an organisation – all under the control of the organisation. All this can be achieved at scale, even across continents.
What are the benefits and advantages of the train-the-trainer way?
Highly effective – In most organisations staff tend to ask for help and advice from others they are more familiar with. Staff are more likely to accept instructions from within an organisation than from external trainers.
Organisation culture is a real thing – Internal trainers have the distinct advantage of being immersed in the environment and culture of the organisation. They often have a deep understanding of the internal operations, products and services offered and the nature of the customer. This advantage that external trainers do not have allows internal trainers to tailor the training content to meet the specific needs of the organisation.
Consistency is king – A core principle in the train-the-trainer course is to create a structured course content, in fact the whole course consistently encourages structure in all teaching. What the concept of structure ensures is that the exact same course content is disseminated throughout the organisation, no matter how often the training takes place and the size of the organisation
Highly Cost effective – It costs significantly less than contracting different experts to train different groups of people. It is much more cost effective to train a very small group who go on to train others.
Customised – The needs of the organisation can change, and those needs could be highly specific that a off-the-shelf course cannot cover. The most effective training is training that is completely designed to meet those needs and that relies on nurturing the right people with the specific skills in the organisation to become trainers.
Developing competency – Being a trainer is a separate skill that complements their existing skillsets. Like all other skills it takes practice and experience to develop that skill. As the trainer starts to train others in the organisation, their competency in both their expertise and being a trainer grows, making them a valuable asset to the organisation for future training opportunities.
What do you need to build the ideal internal training programme?
There are four major elements that need to be in place
- Training Needs Assessment – Define your goals, what do you want to achieve? Who needs training and in what subjects? Who has the expertise and experience in the skills and knowledge you need to pass on to others?
- Design the training curriculum – Turn your training goals into concrete learning objectives, then turn those objectives into logical structured lesson plans.
- Design the assessment process – Being able to accurately recall and apply the skills in the workplace is the goal to training, so you must know if they have learnt the skills you have taught them.
- Create the training materials – Avoid long boring lectures if you can. Use other and multiple ways to convey your key points before, during and after the training sessions, it really helps the delegates understand the key points, and it’s more enjoyable for everyone.