Avoid These Four Mistakes When Training Employees

7/18/2018

One-third of new hires quit their job after just six months. Training your employees is absolutely critical to employee retention, leading some 73% of organizations to revamp their entire onboarding process to foreground retention. In the industry of vacation rentals, it is even more important to make sure that your employees all have the necessary skills and training to succeed since they might work remotely or travel often. 

In order to promote your vacation rental company, managers must reflect your mission and values in every interaction they have with potential customers. Without adequately training your employees, employees are 40% more likely to leave a company after just one year. Improving your training strategy can, therefore, be the answer to retaining your best employees. As you develop your gold-star training program, make sure to avoid these four common mistakes:

Training Lacks Strategic Focus

All too often, vacation rental companies don’t focus on training employees in the skills that are most vital to the business’s specific stage of development. For example, if your employees must take into consideration weather limitations of a rental area, you should train them how to respond quickly to cancellations and prioritize flexible bookings. Before sending employees off to a training session, consider the strategic focus of their new position and the skills they actually need to have. Otherwise, generic training topics will neither motivate nor boost their confidence in their skill set.

Training is Overly Company-Centric

Business leaders claim the most successful employees are the ones who are motivated by autonomy, relatedness and competence. In other words, employees want to be given responsibility to work on their own. Since vacation rental managers will normally be working in independent settings, it doesn’t make sense to offer training that’s overly company-centric. Instead, ask them what skills they want to master in order to perform their jobs more efficiently, and make the training personal.

No Follow-Up After Training 

You organized the training and you may have run the training sessions yourself—but did your new employees understand everything? Vacation rental management always involves loads of moving parts, which is why it’s even more essential for you to make sure your employees gained knowledge from the training. If you don’t follow-up with your employees after training them, you won’t know what they learned and what they still need to be taught. Make sure you assure them that their responses won’t put their job on the line; instead, it’ll help the company as a whole moving forward.

No Training Was Offered

You may think that all companies offer training, but this isn’t always the case—especially for remote companies. In the past, if you’ve been throwing your new vacation rental employees right into their jobs, you need to establish a training program. Employees need time to acclimate and explore the value that they bring to your business. If you don’t offer training, you need to. Otherwise, your employees will take their jobs much less seriously and will probably be confused about your expectations.

By avoiding these four common training mistakes, you can begin to set your new hires up for success in helping to manage your vacation rentals and the organization of your business as a whole.