Employee Training Part I – Field Training

So you’ve gotten to the point in your pet care business where you’ve hired help. AWESOME!! In many ways it’s a relief but with this relief comes questions, so many questions. I’m not talking about the black and white questions like financial, payroll taxes and pay rates. I say black and white because there’s a clear answer to these questions that can be found in your business’s numbers (a topic for a different day). I’m talking about the grey questions. Now that you have employees, how do you keep them, how do you motivate them, how do you train them? If you’ve hired before or even if this is your first hire, you’ve realized that finding the right people is HARD. The last thing you want is for them to leave or worse yet, do something in the field that harms a pet, a client or your business in some way.

Training of your employees is a critical part of how they will initially perform and continue to perform both in the field and on the administrative parts of the job. Training itself is a huge topic including new employee orientation, process training, field training and administrative training. Way too many topics to cover in one article so I’m going to focus here on field shadowing.

Most of us have our employees do some amount of field shadowing. This can be either a more senior employee or you as the business owner doing pet sitting/dog walking visits and having a new or more junior employee follow you around and observe your process. Or it can be you or a senior sitter following a junior employee around and observe them doing a visit themselves. You can do as many or as few shadow visits as needed but you need to do them. The alternative is throwing a brand new employee out into the field with no help or guidance on how to actually perform their job. This is, in fact, how rover.com and the other pet sitting giants out there work. This works out okay much of the time but let’s face it, we’ve all heard the pet sitter horror stories about mistreated pets, most of which could have been avoided with proper oversight and training.

The question then become how many shadowing visits should you do? It depends. The hardest thing for any pet sitting business owner to do is to trust your sitters. At some point you’ll be sending a sitter out alone to interact with the clients and their pets that you’ve worked so hard to get. You can’t control what they do and you’re convinced that no one can do it as well as you can. It’s scary but ultimately, it’s the only way to grow your business and, if growth is your goal, you need to take the plunge. You want to provide adequate training but you don’t want to provide so much oversight that your employee feels smothered.

While it’s difficult to say exactly how many shadowing visits you should do with your employee, what you can assume is that certain periods are more important. New employees should have more shadowing visits. Existing employees who have issues or customer complaints associated with them are also candidates for additional shadowing. And one area that many business owners don’t consider is new clients. Shadowing a sitter, even a long-term employee, to a brand new client on their first visits is a way to insure that new clients get off to a good start. And last but certainly not least, the amount of shadowing you do needs to make sense for your business financially. Training, while critically important, is never free.

What you want to avoid is shadowing a sitter to the point they feel that they’re being micromanaged or that you don’t trust them. It becomes a balance between what makes sense financially, what makes sense for the individual sitter and what make sense to support your clients. All of these needs are important in your decision and, while you can have a basic training program for all employees, you will need to tailor it to individuals.