Have you seen the latest headlines which seem to be affecting most industries?
- Patients asked to stay away from Lakeshore General Hospital due to staffing shortage (Yahoo News, June 11, 2022)
- ‘Help Wanted’ billboards increase as employers struggle to find workers to meet demand (CBS, June 7, 2022)
With good help so hard to find, companies are facing a shrinkflation of not just products, but also service. If you usually employ 10 cleaning people in your hotel, now you might only have 5. If you have 25% less staff working your restaurant, your customers may have to wait longer than usual for their meals. I call that “service shrinkflation.”
So how can we adjust our training to help support our organization?
Adjust Your Training
Onboarding – Meet new hires where they are.
Do you need to broaden existing onboarding training include more information about the industry in general? Put their work into perspective and explain how they are serving a need and making an impact.
Meeting Satisfactory Performance Levels – Quickly get new hires to where you want them to be.
Today’s new hires may not have the experience as previous new hires. You may need to develop additional training to get them to the performance levels where previous new hires began.
Remediation Training – Help poor performers succeed.
If employees are performing only minimally successful after having received required classroom/online and on-the-job training, what (if any) additional training can you develop to bring them to a fully successful level of performance? What changes can you make to your onboarding training to help reduce the number of minimally successful performers?
Facing today’s hiring and retention challenges may seem onerous, but by asking well-crafted questions of their various stakeholders, carefully listening to the answers, and evaluating existing training programs to help fill performance gaps which did not previously exist, training departments can continue to provide a valuable service to their organization. Consider developing new training or modifying existing training to help the new workforce perform with little to no service ‘shrinkflation.’