When you’re heading a small team for a tech startup, investing heavily in their learning and development is always a smart move. As a new tech brand, you need to upscale and monetize quickly off the back of an efficient, forward-thinking workplace, while your employees will want to upskill and hone their marketable skills.
The strain of streamlining new processes and hammering out the kinks in your product can divert resources away from personal development, but if you’re able to prioritize your people, you’ll be able to seize a major advantage over your close competitors.
As you formulate your training and development (T&D) plan, here are four of the best training strategies to help accelerate your startup.
Document Everything
One of the biggest challenges when onboarding people at a startup is standardizing the various best practices, processes, and knowledge that’s gone into realizing your product.
When your tech startup was still in its napkin pitch stage, you may have been keeping most of this information in your head and only showcasing the salient points to investors. However, as your workforce starts to grow, you’ll need to articulate it more formally to ensure consistent results. These are often achieved through carefully considered SOPs.
“No matter how small your team is right now, having solid SOPs, prime examples, and points of reference will act as an essential cornerstone for all future onboarding and training as your startup continues to develop,” says Maxine Bremner from startup agency Hive19. “Though creating these kinds of materials from scratch may feel like a bit of a slog, it’s always worth remembering that initiating new team members will only become more challenging and time-consuming as the pace and growth of your startup accelerates.”
The long-term value of having adequately codified processes and best practices can’t be understated.
Leverage Cheap (and Free!) Educational Resources
In-person ILT (Instructor Led Training) is one of the most popular approaches to on-the-job training, as it allows the trainee to benefit from real-world experiences and ask clarifying questions as they go.
Although there’s a whole host of benefits that come with training that an in-person instructor leads, it’s also the most costly way to train someone in terms of resources.
Suppose you’ve struggled to find investors or even bootstrapped to get your startup off the ground. In that case, you’ll obviously want to be as efficient as possible when it comes to your team’s working hours and any material resources that might contribute to learning and development.
Though instructor-led sessions certainly have their place, leveraging low-cost and free resources for developing your team can be a fantastic way to free up precious time and resources in-house.
Vocational peer-to-peer learning, knowledge hubs and specialized blogs, informal e-learning courses, and other materials can all match traditional forms of training in terms of effectiveness without blocking off time in your leadership team’s calendar.
Though you should never use half-measures when training your startup team, leveraging these accessible resources is a great way to “work harder, not smarter,” giving your team the development they need at a fraction of the usual cost.
Make your Training Scaleable
One of the biggest things that separate successful tech startups from poor ones is the ability to pivot at short notice and adapt to challenges as they arise. We all know that business plans rarely play out exactly as they’re imagined, and this is just as true for your training needs as any other aspect of your venture.
Don’t pour a ton of budget into static training resources that are perfect for your business in the here and now without considering how this might affect your operations in the future.
Startup employees are perpetually busy and need to perform in a lot of different capacities. Asking them to build training resources that might be useless a year or two down the line is a recipe for disaster.
Whenever you’re planning a new element to your training and development, make sure you’re considering its value in the long term and prioritizing training methods that are malleable, easy to distribute and monitor and don’t require constant management to stay effective.
Finding that sweet spot between focused and flexible can be hard. Still, by considering the ROI of various training methods, what your core priorities are, and how they’ll fit in with your operations, you’ll be able to future-proof your T&D and save yourself a headache further down the line.
Make a Habit of Informal Coaching
On-the-fly feedback and coaching are essential to improving your team’s effectiveness.
In the fast-paced world of tech startups, taking the time to examine what’s expected vs. what’s delivered can be hard. However, suppose you can make this exact practice a core part of management’s behavior. In that case, it will help training and development become a natural part of the working day, rather than something that happens a handful of times a year and requires a lot of logistics and hoop-jumping to actually happen.
More traditional approaches to training can often fail to provide the knowledge and guidance that employees need to succeed in their position. If, for example, when a business uses classic annual reviews for their personal development, these sessions will have a singular focus on the employee’s performance for the previous year, with little relevance to the way they’re tackling the challenges they’re facing in the here and now.
To build a more productive training culture at your business, try to make these review sessions as frequent as possible, and keep them relevant to the challenges, tasks, and goals on your employees’ immediate horizon.
Outside of these scheduled chats, fostering a culture of informal feedback flows in both directions is important. Make sure your managers have development on their minds enough to weave little pointers into all their communication and make certain workers aren’t too nervous to share feedback with their managers.
Orchestrating a cultural shift like this will take time, but if you approach it as an ongoing project and grab it by the horns, these conversations could soon rank among your most crucial training assets.
Final Thoughts
Running a tech startup may well be the most fast-paced experience of your professional life, but don’t let the heavy demands of your position distract from the importance and value of training.
Apply these strategies in your relationship with management and employees, and soon enough you’ll form a culture that’s great for your employees, and great for your business!
