Starting Employees Off Right to Keep Them

Your pet care business is humming along tickety boo and you’ve hired your first employee. In Part I of this training series we focusing on field training, popularly known as shadowing. In this BLOG, Part II, we’ll go a little deeper into our training journey to learn about the perfect new employee orientation training.

Now that you have employees, you’ll need to figure out how to motivate them and keep them engaged and happy. We all know finding the right people is HARD so getting them started on the right foot is oh so important and a new employee orientation is a great way to do this! The bad news is, you can mess this up by ignoring it and just throwing them out into the field to sink or swim. The good news is you have an opportunity to make a huge difference in whether they become long term reliable employees or a short term drain on your hiring budget. And whether you do a little or a lot of new employee orientation, it WILL help you retain good employees.

So, the question becomes what do you want your employees to know before they even set foot into the field? It comes down to three main areas: Expectations, Policies and Processes.

We’ll save the first one, Expectation, for last and start with policies. Every company has them but not every company has them written down. This is the first step. You cannot train an employee on your policies if they are not clearly documented. We’ll talk in later BLOGs about which policies are critical and which policies are nice to have but, at a minimum, your employee should be aware of any critical policies affecting either them or their clients.

Then comes Processes. Every company has them, whether they realize it or not. These are things like; how do you perform a pet sitting visit, how do you update a client after a visit, how do you report your time for payroll purposes, etc. And, while some people like to fly by the seat of their pants, show me a company with well documented, clear processes and I’ll show you a successful and growing business. The better documented your processes are the easier it will be to train your employee to them and the more consistently they will be able to follow them when they’re out in the field on their own.

A useful tool in training both policies and processes is an employee handbook or an employee manual. There’s a lot of advice and terminology out there about what needs to go into these but the bottom line is, ANY amount of documenting your policies and processes is GOOD whether you choose to put them all together in that fancy professionally done bound copy or print them out on your home computer.

And last but probably most important is Expectations. Clearly stating what you expect from your employees and, as importantly, what your employee can expect from you will be the difference between their success and failure in the field and ultimately your client’s faith in the brand you’ve worked so hard to build. There is no magical formula for setting expectations. It comes down to you deciding what you want your business, your employees and your action to reflect. I expect my employees to treat others in a respectful way. I expect them to come to me with problems, no matter how grave. I expect them to be the protector of the animals in their care and to work with me and the pet parents to address any animal safety issues. These are the core values that make up the foundation of my business. As a small business owner, you need to understand your own.

Those are the main areas to cover with any new employee. You can take an hour, you can take many hours; you can go into a little or a lot of detail. Taylor it to what works for you but don’t skip it! You’ll never regret spending the time to make sure your employee gets the best possible start to becoming a star in your business! Tune in next time to hear the 3^rd and final BLOG on training; Developing Your Employees Through Continuing Education.

Starting Employees Off Right to Keep Them

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