How To Efficiently Get Your Seasonal Staff Trained Using Online Learning
The festive season is drawing near, and while some industries might be winding down, the retail industry is reaching its busiest time of the year. For many businesses, this short period can account for at least 20% of their total annual profit [1]. To deal with this spike in footfall, many retail businesses will hire temporary seasonal staff.
This presents a unique challenge for training departments. In the whirlwind of activity approaching Christmas, time is precious and, in many cases, training and development will be pushed down the list of priorities. Learning managers in other industries have seen the waning impact of the traditional training approach in today’s fast-paced, information-rich world. When it comes to training seasonal staff quickly and effectively, these shortcomings are particularly acute.
The good news is that there are other, more efficient methods that can help you get your Christmas temps battle-ready in the run up to the big day.
1. Get Prepared Early
Make sure you don’t leave hiring temps until the last minute. The retail manager’s to-do list is going to get very long in the run-up to the festive period, and it’s all too easy to forget about hiring a few extra pairs of hands. Things get even more complicated when you lack clarity on the overall organizational strategy. Since the industry changes every year, you can never assume that last year’s policy on temporary staff is the same as this year’s.
It’s best to use the quieter months of the year to discuss and finalize these details, letting managers plan effectively. A social learning platform will prove enormously useful for improving communication, and it will let you get those important messages to the people that need them.
2. Onboard Your Temps Online
If you’ve ever worked in a retail environment, you’ll know that there aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish everything. Temporary staff can provide a welcome relief but training them is yet another task to fit into a crammed schedule. The answer is to get them up to speed before they even step behind a till.
With the right LMS, you can create an entirely separate environment for your temps with its own learning pathway. This lets you focus on an onboarding program that can give the learners all they need from the comfort of their own desktops. Now, you can even create a mobile app specifically to deal with your onboarding needs. Rather than struggling to remain afloat in the pre-Christmas chaos, they’ll have all they need to hit the ground running.
3. Create A Learning Culture
This doesn’t specifically address training Christmas temps, but a learning culture is a powerful weapon for any business need. When Learning and Development is embedded in the culture of the organization throughout the year, your entire workforce will be behind you as you work on training temporary workers.
Since we learn more from our peers than we do from formal content, it pays to think of your learners as an extension of the training department. If they feel empowered to share their expertise with new starters, they’ll help take some of the pressure off the L&D team. This means that when your temporary staff step into the breach, the rest of the team will be eager to help them out.
4. Make The Training Mobile
If you want your training to reach your temps, you might struggle if the content is only accessible on a desktop. As of 2016, more people choose to access the internet on their smartphones than on their computers. Moreover, in a retail environment in the weeks leading up to Christmas, most of the terminals in the store will be needed to address customer queries.
Chances are your temps have a mobile device that they never stop using. If you want to engage them with their training, you need to take the content to them. Make sure your LMS is mobile responsive, and it lets you send notifications and reminders. You’ll also need to ensure that the content performs as it should on a mobile device. Rather than trying to adapt your clunky desktop eLearning, create campaign-based content specifically for mobile devices.
5. Keep The Training Bite-Sized
Because of the many priorities jostling for your learners’ attention in this busy time, you can’t realistically expect them to fit a 30-minute eLearning unit into their schedule. With queues snaking around the store and shelves in need of replenishment, they’ll have barely enough time to enjoy a full lunch break.
On the other hand, if they are lucky enough to find a few minutes’ peace, your training should easily fit into that brief respite. Because we’re only equipped to retain a certain amount of information at any given time, shorter units are also more effective and more likely to have an impact.
Conclusion
If you’re reading this in November, or even October, it’s probably already too late to consider training your seasonal temps. This year, you’ll just have to struggle through just like you’ve always done. Through no fault of their own, your undertrained temps will generate the same annoying discrepancies, and your managers will need to spend hours of their precious time fixing them.
Once the panic of the Christmas rush is over, you can sit down and create a plan to ensure that next year won’t throw the same challenges at you. That’s 12 months to create a flexible social learning campaign that will help create a culture of knowledge sharing and a fertile learning environment. Once you have that, you’ll be giving everyone in your organization a Christmas present that they can enjoy all year round!
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