Think about the last time you watched a team member do something their own way – a shortcut here – an extra step there – a way of doing it you’d never have shown them. Now ask yourself where they picked it up.
Somebody taught them
It’s rare that someone will work out a job on their own. Nearly everyone learns how to do tasks from someone, and in most businesses that someone is the person who happened to be sitting next to them in week one.
That person passed on how to do the task, along with their shortcuts, their workarounds and the odd bad habit they’d picked up themselves. None of it was planned. To the new starter it felt like training and they had no reason to question it, because it came from somebody who’d been there longer.
How the standard drifts
Then, that new starter trains the person that comes along after them. A little gets added and a little gets lost each time, a bit like that game where you pass a message round a circle to see what it turns into by the end. Spoiler alert: it always changes by the time you get to the end.
Meanwhile you carry on believing your team is doing things the way you want them to, because nobody has told you otherwise. The standard you think you have and the one being handed on slowly drift apart, and you only find out when a customer gets two different answers, or a mistake gets made that you were sure your team knew how to avoid.
This is how the Frustration Gap opens up, because you expect one thing and your team have only ever been shown something very different.
A simple test
Ask three team members who taught them how to do the same particular task and what they were told. Ask each of them to talk you through how they do the task, and compare the three methods.
You’ll usually get three slightly different (sometimes very different) ways to do the same job.
What to do about it
At McDonald’s, training was always planned. You were trained by someone who knew the McDonald’s Way of doing the task and the standard expected, and it was rare for one new person to train another off the cuff.
You can do the same in your business. Take the task from your test, the one that came back as three different versions, and sit down with all three team members to work out the most Simple, Logical, Repeatable way to do it. Then agree that as the standard.
Every new starter is then trained one to one by someone who knows that one right way, so they can ask questions as they go, and build their confidence. The How To video is there as back up in case they forget once their trainer has moved on. Simples.
Training happens in your business with or without a plan. Make one.
