According to research done by McKinsey in 2022, about 70 percent of the US workforce is considered frontlines. These are retail workers, healthcare workers, sales, hospitality, sanitation, food service, and a host of other people. The vast majority of these workers don’t have a company email address or access to the company intranet. Most of them will never visit any sort of corporate office or interact with the executives who make decisions regarding the company’s strategy or culture.
The leader your frontline workers are going to interact with the most is their direct manager, who is out in the field with them. To most frontline workers, their manager IS the company. These managers have a better sense of what life is like for the frontlines than any corporate employee will. That’s why it’s so important that these managers have a stellar relationship with their direct reports.
One skill that is often overlooked in a manager’s skillset is their ability to train others. This is a vital skill that enables managers to create positive relationships, to set their team up for success, and to represent the company true to its culture. What follows are three reasons managers need good training skills.
They Are the First Impression for Your New Employees
When a new hire comes to interview and begin their job with your organization, their manager is often the first person they interact with. New hires interview with this manager, they are greeted by the manager on their first day, and the manager will be responsible for introducing them to new people and to the culture. Whatever opinion these new hires form of their manager will be the opinion they form of the company.
When a customer interacts with your organization, their first impression is crucial. And by the same token, a new hire’s first impression is crucial to how they feel about joining that organization. In order to attract and keep the best talent, their relationship with their manager is perhaps the most important aspect of their employment. Good training skills help a manager put new hires at ease and get them acquainted with their new environment quickly.
Your Managers Distill Your Company Culture
Frontline employees are your brand, more than anyone else. They interact with your customers more than any corporate worker, VP, or employee from behind a desk. Every person your customer interacts with in their experience with your company shapes their opinion of that company. So it’s vital that your frontline workers feel connected to your culture and values!
We can give these employees training on the computer, and we can make flyers for field locations to print and hang in a break room, but the best way for your frontline workers to feel connected is for them to feel connected to the managers they work with. Managers of your frontline workers are the most influential people in their experience in the workplace. What’s important to your managers will be important to them. When managers are good trainers, they understand that what they do will influence what their team will do.
Your Managers Will Be Upskilling New Hires
Most often, when a new hire comes on board, there are new skills for them to pick up. Those skills are often trained by other employees, but managers are ultimately responsible for making sure their staff has the skills they need to perform their roles.
When a manager is ineffective at training, new hires end up lost and overwhelmed with new responsibilities. Overwhelmed employees become former employees, and it happens lightning fast these days. Since the three most important aspects of a job to new hires is manager relationship, development, and pay, making a manager a good trainer helps tremendously.
The good news is that, just like any other skill, being a good trainer is teachable! Anyone can be taught to be better at relaying information and skills to others. There are evidence-based practices that, once put in place, increase the efficacy of training exponentially. And once those skills are being practiced on the frontline, things like turnover start to go down while things like teamwork and morale start to go up.
If you’re interested in making your managers better trainers, why not drop us a line? We’d love to hear from you!