The Gold(ilocks) Standard for Your Onboarding Process

The Gold(ilocks) Standard for Your Onboarding Process: Episode 042 SuperPumped Business

Ben Walters: [00:00:00] Today I want to talk about the Goldilocks training rule, and that may seem silly to think about a children's book helping you slay the turnover dragon, and increase profits to levels maybe you've never seen, and to finally start building the type of business, the type of organization you want. For those of you who don't know the story of Goldilocks, it's a story of a little girl and she is somewhere out in the woods. I'm not sure why she's out in the woods or why she's out in the woods alone, but she is.

Ben Walters: She goes to the house of three bears, and in that house, the first thing she does is she tries, they have made some porridge and they have let that porridge cool. And she goes to the first bowl of porridge and it is way too hot. It burns her tongue. Then she goes to the second bowl of porridge and it's cold. Nobody likes cold porridge. Yuck, right? And she goes to the third bowl of porridge and it is just right. Then she's [00:01:00] like, that was pretty good. I had a full belly full of porridge.

Ben Walters: And like many of us, like this bear particularly, you want a nice, comfortable chair, right? After you've had your porridge. Think about after Sunday dinner, right? She goes to the first chair and it's, it's uncomfortable.

Ben Walters: And then she goes to the second chair, and that one's not comfortable either. Maybe a little too small and just not right. And she goes to the third chair and it fits just perfectly. And she's like sitting in that chair relaxing. And then pretty soon you've relaxed in the chair, you've had your porridge, and then you need a little nap, right?

Ben Walters: She goes to the beds and she goes to the first bed, and it's way too big and it's just uncomfortable. She's swimming in it. And then she goes to the second one. And if you've ever been in a bed that's too small, your feet are popping out the end, and maybe you've cuddled with one of your kids when they can't get back to sleep or they have a nightmare. You lay in there, your calf on down to your feet or out, no blankets, you're freezing, it's miserable. So the second bed for Goldilocks isn't good. And so [00:02:00] finally then she finds the third bed and it's just right. Then she's just comfortably sleeping. And all of a sudden the bears come back and they're mad and they end up coming in the house and she gets startled and she runs off. And according to the story, they never see her again, and she never goes there again.

Ben Walters: As we think about this in the process of turnover, the training portion is where people begin to feel out whether they're comfortable somewhere, whether they can do the job they need to do, and how to do that.

Ben Walters: And if you mess this up, just like Goldilocks, they're gonna run away and never come back. All that money you've invested in the recruiting phase and the initial onboarding, that's all gonna go by the wayside and you're gonna be back to square one trying to get those people into your organization.

Ben Walters: Specifically, as we think about Goldilocks, a lot of the stuff she found was either too hot, or too cold, too [00:03:00] big, or too small. Just not comfortable, and it's the same thing with training. What I find is, the amount of training we do, we have to get that just-right, sweet spot. Specifically the way I see it is, and this is how it played out in my business, as we bring someone on board, right? If we give them too little training, if we just bring them in and say, this is the job. It's like giving them too cold porridge. It just doesn't taste good and they're not quite sure what to do. And do you know what happens pretty quickly if you just throw them into the deep end of the pool with no life preserver, no training, no swimming ability? They're gonna drown. They're gonna be no use to your company. I find that a lot of companies just throw people in without enough training so It doesn't work out.

Ben Walters: But the second problem is, is that people get trainer help or trainer subsidy too long. [00:04:00] If you have a trainer for too long, you begin to think, there's no way one person could do this because I've been with Tom the Trainer for the last two weeks, and it's taken Tom the Trainer and myself both to do this job. So there's no way I can do this myself.

Ben Walters: Now I have seen this play out in my own businesses, but I've also seen this play out with my special needs brother Tony. Tony, because he's special needs and is in certain programs for people with developmental disabilities, he has had many trainers over the years. He went to one place, it was a hotel. He had a trainer for a very short period of time, and then he was expected to do this like seven-page list of things in the hotel, and he has limited reading ability and he just couldn't do it and it stressed him out. And then his boss was mad Tony, why aren't you doing this? But he just didn't get properly trained he wasn't able to do it and pretty quickly he washed out of [00:05:00] that job.

Ben Walters: Then he's also had other jobs where he had a trainer for way too long. He had a trainer at one job for two and a half months. He got pretty happy only doing, a third, or half, or maybe a little more than half the job while the trainer did the other half the job. But that became his routine. He began to believe he could only do part of the job, and he needed the trainer to do the rest. He never ramped up to full productivity. After two and a half months, the trainer left and he couldn't get it rolling enough to do the whole job. The employer said we put two and a half months of training into this kid, and he still can't get the job. So you're fired.

Ben Walters: All that time, think about two and a half months of training and he went by the wayside. You have got to figure out in your business how long to train people. In our cleaning business, we had a very simple rule. By the end of one week, we wanted that person fully trained up. We did a [00:06:00] 20/40/60/80/100% rule, meaning on a five day work week on day one, we were only expecting roughly 20% output from that person, and the other 80% of the job was being done by other people, including the trainer.

Ben Walters: Then on day two, we doubled the amount of stuff we taught them that they were doing, and all of a sudden they're doing 40% of the job. And then on day three, they're doing 60% of the job. Day, four, 80%, and day five, finally close to a hundred percent, maybe not quite a hundred percent, but what we found was if we threw 'em in and we said, in one day or two days, you need to do this whole thing, they were overwhelmed. And when people get overwhelmed in the training process, as you're onboarding them, they're gonna quit. But on the other hand, just like Tony, we found that if we stuck a trainer with them too long, they began to think, this is impossible. I have a trainer [00:07:00] and me and it's taken two of us to do this job. There is no way I can get through all of that on my own.

Ben Walters: We realized you need to subsidize the amount of work that's gonna be done for a period of time, and for each business that's gonna vary. But the thing I want you to do as an employer of choice is I want you to really actively work at that process and garner feedback from your employees. Maybe you're holding their hand too long, or maybe you're not holding their hand long enough.

Ben Walters: This is the Goldilocks principle when it comes to training: you wanna get it just right. You don't want to come in too hot, but you don't want to come in too cold. And if you do, good things will happen.

Ben Walters: Now, final note, going back to the Goldilocks story, sometimes we let that person have the keys to the castle, right? And we let them Then do their thing, and they're feeling their way, and Goldilocks was in that house feeling pretty good. She'd [00:08:00] tried some things that didn't work and some other things that didn't work, but she'd found those sweet spots. The bears came in they came in and they were all riled up, and they were carrying on causing a ruckus, and they scared Goldilocks.

Ben Walters: I see that with training where we get someone settled in and we think we have it just right, and then we come back maybe something small or maybe even large goes awry and we come in like a thundering herd of bears and we're like, this wasn't right, and I thought we trained you better. You need to do this better. And do you know what they do? They freak out and they're like, eh, I don't like this place. They're scared of me. They bail. And then guess what? You are out of a person.

Ben Walters: So as you begin to train people, I want you to actively work on the Goldilocks principle. I want you to work on getting it just right. Not too hot, not too cold, but make that employee comfortable. Make them feel like they fit in the bed, they fit in the chair, and the porridge you have created [00:09:00] for them is perfect.

Ben Walters: Thanks for joining me today on the SuperPumped Business Podcast. If you want help with any of the process of recruiting, onboarding, or retaining your employees so that you make more profit and increase your retention, hit me up. I'd love to talk to you. I'll see you next time.

Ben Walters: Thanks for joining me today on the SuperPumped Business Podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, I have two quick next steps for you. First, subscribe or follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. And second, jump on over to superpumped.com to find out all the incredible ways we can help you launch your SuperPumped Business.

Ben Walters: Keep well and I'll see you next time.