Office Goofs, Ken Okel, Clear the Path, train your employees, Starbucks, Starbucks training day, the cost of poor training, customer service, branding, making espresso, Starbucks has lousy baristas, how to train your employees, Florida professional speaker, Orlando Miami Leadership SpeakerWhen someone joins your organization, how well is he or she trained? Are policies in place to make sure they learned what they need to know?

The rush to make a new hire immediately productive can result in either incomplete training or training that is indefinitely postponed. These costly decisions can hurt your sales and your brand.

Let’s Clear the Path of this problem by giving you a cup of coffee.

That was something hard to do if you had a craving for Starbucks on February 26, 2008 at 5:30 p.m. At that time, Starbucks closed 7,100 stores for three hours. The goal was to retrain 135,000 employees in how to make a good espresso.

At the time, the company was dealing with new competition, overaggressive expansion, and complaints about quality. The three hour shutdown was seen as the only way everyone could be guaranteed to be properly trained. The company had to teach employees how to do what it claimed it did better than anyone else in the world.

As a result, Starbucks lost millions of dollars in sales by closing its doors. It gained the knowledge that any two baristas across the country would be able to make the same cup of coffee.

Do you think executives wished that training had been better immediately after the hiring process? Would some of the corporate challenges existed had the customer experience been kept consistent from day one? How many customers left and never came back because they were seduced by either a lower cost or a better experience elsewhere.

What’s the difference between your company and Starbucks? Starbucks can get a ton of free publicity for its training exercise that can offset losses. Will you enjoy the same?

Here area some suggestions if you want to avoid the cost of retraining:

  • Train your employees from day one and stress why your way is the best way.
  • Assign them a mentor to make sure that the knowledge is being put into practice.
  • Make sure the new employee understands things so well that he or she could show the ropes to an outsider. Knowing that you have to teach something is a great way to learn.