Note: This is the second in a series of blog posts based on Business HindSite’s “How Training Improves Your Bottom Line” presented by David Crary and Ruth King. To watch the entire show, click here.
By David Crary 
As I mentioned in the previous post, training is a very crucial part to growing your field service management business. Training keeps you ahead of your competitors, allows your employees to provide greater customer service, and can give you a sense of pride in not only your business but yourself.
But that does not mean that simply by offering training to employees that it will go over smoothly and make everyone and everything better within the company. There is such a thing as unsuccessful training. I have come across a few different instances in my landscape management business where the training just wasn’t going to happen, or if it did, it would be a bust.
Here are a few instances when training will inevitably be unsuccessful:
An Unable Employee.
This is a pretty obvious instance of where training would be unsuccessful, but sometimes it slips our mind what our employees are capable of. We get a vision in our head of where we want our company and go and we just dive head first without fully thinking things through.
There are certain employees you will have that will be physically or perhaps even at times mentally incapable of performing a certain task/job/service. Attempting to train this person would be a waste of both resources and time.
Tip: Find the employee who struggles to go through training something else to learn. Perhaps it’s as simple as taking better pictures in the field, or maybe it could be a more complex service you would like to try out. Whatever it is, don’t just push the employee aside. Find them something else they can be trained on.
An Unwilling Employee.
There are times as a business owner when you will also be faced with the unwilling employee. The unwilling employee is the one who sits in the back of the room with his arms crossed over his chest and who makes no attempt to be part of the training process.
These are usually tougher to handle than the unable employees because they don’t want to learn something new. I believe you have to have the capacity to learn, but you also need to have the capacity to want to learn.
Tip: Sit down with the unwilling employee and find out why they are being difficult with the training process. They may have an acceptable reason. If they do not have an acceptable reason, however, and are unwilling to at least attempt training, it may be time to reconsider their position within the company. Your company doesn’t need anyone on its team that isn’t going to be a team player and help to upgrade the status of the company. A lot of your employees are probably there every day for the paycheck they receive at the end of a hard day’s work, and that’s respectable, but you want people who are also willing to put in an effort towards making the company better.
Insider Trainer.
The success of the training depends on the trainer and the topic being taught. Having someone on the inside of your company training your other employees is a tricky situation. On one hand, the employees may really like it and an added bonus it saves you money. On the downside, your employees may not want to be taught by a fellow coworker. It’s possible they don’t respect the employee you elected to train or they may feel they know more than the trainer.
Tip: Use an outside trainer. Your employees will most likely respect someone brought in to train rather than an inside trainer. Your team will also know they are receiving training from an expert because you wouldn’t pay for someone that wasn’t skilled enough.
It is important to weigh the costs versus benefits when deciding if training will be successful or not. Is it worth it to pay for an expert or classes for your guys if they will receive a better understanding and lesson than from an inside trainer? Is the unwilling employee’s stubbornness worth the halt in the field service management company’s growth? Not every training session will go smoothly or turn out exactly the way you thought, but there are measures you can take to ensure you and your team are getting the most out of the time and resources spent on training.
Tune in tomorrow for the next installment of Business HindSite’s “How Training Improves Your Bottom Line: The Who, What, Where, When and Why of Training.”