Training – for the lower echelon

Organisations conduct extensive training for their skilled employees, routinely. It is expected. For, how can an employee perform the unique functions according to the company's norms, employing the custom processes, unless detailed knowledge is imparted, and a certain amount of role-playing is simulated?

However, what is thought normal for skilled employees is most often neglected for those who are lower in the payscale. A receptionist, a store clerk, a delivery boy, a help-desk person, a company driver, a mechanic, and such others are examples of those who are not put through a thorough course which would make them aware of (1) all the know-how they should carry in their heads, (2) other references they should have at hand, (3) the range of situations they can be confronted with in real life, and (4) how to act appropriately.

As a consequence, the organistion fails to look professional when a client comes through and encounters one of these portals. The receptionist may fail to be precise or proves less than helpful in locating people, and makes little effort to put the incoming person at ease. In much the same way a company driver may not be told how to address those who are being met or transported, and how to help them aboard and and what pointers to give, which questions to expect, and how to drop them off. It is in the little things that the company's training evinces professionalism; and conversely, goofing up on little things makes the amateurishness apparent.

Customers are turned off by experiences at the interfaces of the company to the public. These flaws are easily detected by outsiders, but the company's management remains blithely unaware because they never enter through any of the interfaces that customers, vendors, visitors and others have to come through. They would do well to correct this lacuna by blind testing and gather the information to convince themselves the system is at fault in neglecting the training of people at the lower rungs. Such carelessness indicates, moreover, a dual lack of care: for these employees and for the customers who will encounter them.

Two weeks a year in training is par for skilled employees in a well-known company. Is it too little to expect one week in training upon induction into any job, and a day or two every year, to make sure every function (however peripheral it is thought to be) keeps improving its functioning?