Employee training and development benefits are numerous: enhancing skills, staying current on trends, and perhaps team bonding and company engagement. Don’t discount the benefits your company also gains: additional work through enhanced expertise, attracting quality talent, and retaining your current workforce.

Training is a need the industry feels isn’t being met; respondents in the past few NKBA/John Burns Kitchen & Bath Market Index (KBMI) reports have noted that the lack of availability and cost of skilled laborers have prevented them from keeping up with demand, delaying projects, and hindering expansion.

It’s true that training takes away time that could be used to bring in or complete work. So, when it comes to upskilling your team, how do you provide and receive the greatest value?

How to evaluate team training needs

Start by looking at the team you want to train. Consider:

• Roles: Does your training need to account for customer-facing and production roles? Managers? Anyone else?
  Company size: If you are larger, do you have people internally who can lead training? Are you a smaller shop where each person needs their own training?
• Topics: Are you looking to brush up on basics, keep a certification, or jump into a new focus area? Are there skill gaps you should address?
• Investment: How much time and money will you set aside for training?

While each role has its own specific needs regarding training, David Euscher, chair-elect of the ASID Board of Directors, explained why everyone should stay current. 

“Designers should be aware of the latest products and construction techniques to provide the best solutions for their clients. Similarly, manufacturers, contractors, and installers need to keep current to provide solutions that are innovative to meet the changing demands of the customer base — both end users and designers alike,” he noted.

Consider delivery methods

Once you have evaluated team training needs, determine how the information will be delivered. Options range from online (webinars or learning modules) to in-house training (lunch and learn or knowledge sharing) or off-site learnings (workshops or trade shows).

“Training and educational programs should consider differences in learning styles and adopt a multi-modality approach that can reach learners where they are,” Euscher said. 

He recommends:

• Holding focus by pacing learning activities with breaks.
• Providing various learning methods with each training, such as explanation, demonstration, and hands-on learning.
• Offering different levels of instruction for learners with different amounts of experience.
• Improving retention with recaps or assessments throughout training.

At Closets To Go, Owner Jeff Turner tells how training is integral for all employees from Day 1, providing new hires a nearly yearlong mentorship. Having a mentor next to new employees helps accelerate learning and development, serving as guidance or a sounding board, and someone they can lean on, he says.

“We want to make certain [that new employees are] confident with the design element, understanding all the rules, and are able to develop trust with customers so that we can earn that opportunity to do business with them,” Turner said.

Creating a well-rounded training program

While it’s important to stay up-to-date on what’s new and emerging in the closet space, don’t overlook less obvious factors.

Excel at relationship-building: Soft skills — the behaviors and traits that help us all interact with one another — are necessary to work more productively with coworkers and customers alike.

“People skills enable everyone in the project ecosystem to communicate better with one another, which leads to more successful outcomes,” Euscher said. “Having any one of the people in the project ecosystem — designer, manufacturer, contractor/installer — able to call on one another for support in working through a project will result in a shared responsibility and a shared success.”

Understand the entire business: Training company employees across all departments on all aspects of your product and process is good for business and customers. For example, when creating a space, a designer needs to think about: “What’s my shop capable of doing? Make sure it can be manufactured properly, assembled, and installed,” Turner said.

Train the trainer: Go outside your organization for training, even if that is only for the trainer themself. Eric Marshall, an independent consultant and trainer with the Closet Training Institute, emphasizes the limitations of keeping training in-house:

“You shouldn’t just use your interior company knowledge and think that you are the best. We can all learn. Everyone needs training, even the trainer.”

Measuring training’s impact

Take time to evaluate the progress that training brings:

Before you begin:

• Identify specific and measurable outcomes and objectives.
• Create a baseline understanding of where your team is at before beginning.
   

Following any training efforts:

• Measure success through feedback, surveys, quizzes or other results-based markers.
• Gather the amount spent on and brought in as a result of training.

Use that information to determine the next training — what to keep or how to adjust — and measure your return on investment. A common formula to measure success is:

ROI = (Profit / Investment) x 100

“Everybody needs support; we can get too busy to even do our jobs. Then it becomes overwhelming, and satisfaction of employment can go down,” Turner acknowledged. “Work off the capacity that people are serving our customers.… If you do your job correctly, you will be rewarded with that dollar or more opportunity.”
After all, Turner warned, “You’re only as good as your weakest link.”