I was sitting at a meeting the other day, when a gentleman started to ask a very long question. The woman sitting next to me had started a networking company, and about mid-way through his question, she leaned over and said, “You should be sure to introduce yourself to this guy - he’s passionate about the same things you are.”

The funny thing was, I had completely tuned him out because the question was so long. Meanwhile, she was listening and realized that he was passionate about my work, and that he might be a huge fan, supporter, or even asset to us some day.

It was a valuable lesson for me about one little thing (listening) that you can do to improve your networking skills.

What can you teach your employees about connecting with clients, co-workers, supervisors, or strangers that will improve your business?

I recall being at the bar with friends once, and we saw the bartender - a guy maybe a couple years older than me - making repeated trips to the jukebox with his tips. For most of the night, he was calling the shots on what we were listening to, on his own dime.

Now, if you’re this employee’s manager, how easy is it to think of something that will keep him around at this point? How many different ways are there to leverage this employee’s love for music so that you can get him to give you his best?

• If he comes in to cover a shift, or he’s having a bad night, why not load the jukebox up with a five spot to let him know you appreciate his work?

• Maybe can give him some credits in the jukebox for every shift he works. (This is a double perk because it leaves extra money in his pocket, too.)

• If you can, turn off the jukebox and let him choose a radio station. He’ll have trouble quitting because he can’t find another job where he can choose the music.

Just because your Generation Y employees value work/life balance doesn’t mean that you can’t bring a bit of their life into work to make things happen.

Difficult selection processes can include:

• Applying in person. If someone won’t get out of his chair to come apply for the position you’re offering, this is not passionate person.
• Writing a resume. So, you employ people who are applying for their first job? Request a resume instead of giving them an application form - you’ll see very quickly who is willing to take a little time for their job and who isn’t.
• Taking a test. One public relations position I applied for required a writing test after the first round of interviews. I really enjoyed the test, and it got me fired up about the rest of the application process. If it hadn’t, I would’ve removed myself from the applicant pool with great haste.
• An interview on steroids. It’s one thing to sit down and speak with applicants to see what they say they’re like, and entirely another to force them to act to see what they’re really like. Some managers use a walk test during an interview, where they simply have an applicant follow them for a tour of the facility and gauge applicants’ interest and passion by observing how the applicant keeps up with their brisk pace.

Difficult to use selection processes can include:

• Not knowing where to apply. It doesn’t matter how motivated I am, if I don’t know when and where to apply, you’re going to have a hard time getting me in the door.
• Tons of meaningless or unrelated paperwork. It’s one thing to take a test related to what I’m doing, and entirely another to fill out forms that don’t seem to relate to what I want to do. If you have forms that seem obliquely related but you know they’re intimately related to the job, explain to applicants how they fit into the big picture.
• Lame people. Whether it’s boring, rude, or disinterested people, the easiest way to knock passionate potential employees out of a hiring process is to have them interact with people they know they won’t want to work with. No matter how well crafted the rest of the process is or how passionate the applicant is, staffing your selection process with grouches and bores will cost you talent.

When you’re training a young employee, one of the things you want to do is impart lessons that will stick. Memorable lessons are powerful because when your front line can remember the tasks, procedures, ingredients, steps, etc. involved in a given product or process, they are that much closer to mastering their jobs. Mastery makes your employees productive (which is good for you) and confident (which is also good for you).

Three ways to make lessons really memorable for your Millennial employees:

1. Great mnemonics

I started working at a restaurant after my junior year of high school. As anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant can tell you, one of the biggest challenges when starting is to assimilate the menu into your store of knowledge. The first item I learned to make was a sandwich, and I still remember how to make it because my trainer gave me a really simple way to remember how to make the sandwich: “Red sauce, red bread.” I don’t know if it was the color matching, or just the rhyme, but that’s stuck with me ever since. I found it incredibly helpful at the time, as it was my first step toward actually feeling like I could accomplish my job there.

So, whether your mnemonics are acronyms, rhymes, or other little memory schemes, employ them. They help young people learn.

2. Repetition.

I worked at Panera Bread for years, and I can still rattle off the ingredients for a cafe sandwich quickly enough that you’d think it’s a single long word: ‘Mayonaisemustardlettucetomatoesonionandsaltandpepper.” See? Effortless. And why do I still know that? I must have repeated it 17 million times while I was there.

There’s a difference, though, between plain old repetition (aka - boring) and useful repetition. The useful repetition involves attacking the same material from a number of angles. Whether it’s as the answer to a quiz, actually assembling the pieces you’re listing, seeing who can make the best story about the items you’re listing, or any of a million other ways to address the same information, the key to effective repetition when training young people is that you’re repeating the content while changing up the delivery.

3. Learning The Hard Way

When I started my first restaurant job, I was in the back doing the dishes. For most of my first shift, I spent most of the evening with a brush, scrubbing each fork, knife, and spoon individually. Anyone who has ever washed large amounts of dishes can tell you that this is a horribly slow way to do dishes. A horribly, horribly, horribly slow way to do dishes. With about an hour or so left in the night, one of the trainers finally walked up and offered me a hand for two minutes. He put all the silverware on a tray, sprayed it down, scrubbed a couple stubborn ones, and ran it straight through the sanitizer. Much to my chagrin, he’d accomplished more in about five minutes than I had in the majority of my shift.

I learned a valuable lesson from that - and it wasn’t just that there is a more efficient way to wash silverware. I learned that there are more efficient ways to approach most processes, and that there’s a good reason those approaches are used. But none of it would have stuck if I hadn’t experienced that single moment of painful realization. While I believe that trying to show your Millennials the right way to do something is the best place to start, sometimes it’s more valuable to let them do something the wrong way once so they can see why it’s the wrong way.

Your turn

Leave a comment - tell me about a training strategy that has had a long-term impact on you.

1. “This is how we’re supposed to do it.”

The continuation of this sentence is “But here’s how we really do it.” This sends your young employee a very clear message: our standards are negotiable. Once I’ve realized that standards can be negotiated in one area, I am always ready to negotiate standards in every other area. (In fact, I typically enjoy doing so.)

2. “Corporate says…”

Corporate versus the front-line is the ultimate workplace conflict. It’s the haves versus the have-nots. It’s the in-touch versus the out-of-touch. It’s young versus old. It’s operations people versus profit people. It’s us against them. It’s unpleasant to sit through, and it hurts your bottom line. So, why the hell would you start this fight during your training? I understand that you don’t really want to be held responsible for some of the bone-headed things that come down from corporate. (Please refer to my rant on desk drawers for an example.) Tough luck. It’s much more valuable to have your staff at peace with your company’s rainmakers than it is to have them think you are the coolest manager ever. Behave accordingly.

3. “If you’ve got the time…”

Speaking as an employee who has worked in a half-dozen different business models, from quick casual restaurants to major retail chains to small businesses: I never have the time. I am a busy person who is constantly working on something. If it’s important, teach me that it needs to be done and give me a deadline. If it’s not important, don’t ask.

4. “Please.”

Your English teachers didn’t say, “Please, students, put quotation marks around a direct quotation.” They said, “Quotation marks are required to indicate a direct quotation.” They did this because requests can be turned down, but requirements cannot. Your training in the workplace should operate on the same principal.

5. “Because I said so.”

If I ask why we have a certain practice, you better have an answer ready. And it better be a specific, functional answer. For instance, “Why do we put three tomatoes on a sandwich?” is a question I might ask. If you reply, “That’s the spec,” or “Corporate wants it that way,” odds are good I’m going to think you’re a jerk. Odds are even better that I won’t bother to do it unless you’re around, because your word and your authority are about as meaningful to me as a reference to Mayberry. However, if you say, “Well, it’s a combination of factors: We’ve done the math, and three tomatoes allows us to make good money, while at the same time not throwing off the taste of the sandwich,” I now understand why we do what we do, and can better help us reach our goals because profit and taste are meaningful concepts to me.

Here are five things you could teach me during a down period, instead of asking me to detail the soda fountain a third time:

1. Train me in a new area

All I do is make sandwiches. Throw me on a cash register for a while. Cross-training is good for your business. It’s also a great cure for boredom.

2. Show me how to interpret customer feedback

Most large companies use phone-in or e-mail surveys. Show me these. Teach me what they mean. If you don’t have this kind of a system, walk the floor with me. Teach me how to talk to customers and anticipate problems. I’ll be engaged while we’re talking and I’ll be better informed in the future.

3. Teach me about the nuts and bolts of running this business

Teach me about costs. Teach me how to control them. The more I understand about “the business we’ve chosen,” the more effective I’ll be. (Note, however, that if I seem bored by this, don’t waste your time. Some people will get into it. Others won’t. You can have them detail the fountain.)

4. Ordering

Go a step past what you did when you taught me about costs and get me involved in ordering supplies, food, or whatever. Even if you never intend to have me complete a single order, learning the amount of intelligent guessing that goes into a good order is a humbling experience. I probably won’t complain quite so loudly next time we’re out of some supply or another. And, if I’m reliable, you’ve just taken a task off of your plate.

5. Let me go home

Doesn’t really keep me busy, but I’m more likely to be busy in the future if I’m not burned out by mind-numbing boredom.

A note

I know this list is a little restaurant-centric, but it can be applied to almost any industry. Just substitute restaurant tasks (detailing the fountain) for retail tasks (re-folding clothes) or office tasks (collating).

My first day of my first real job, I walked in and was introduced to my trainer: Jim.

Jim was an interesting choice to be my trainer. On the one hand, he clearly knew his stuff, and he could communicate the information adequately. This is always a good thing for a trainer to do.

On the other hand, Jim was a middle-aged father, while I was seventeen-year-old kid without a care in the world. Common ground was a little hard to come by in this arrangement. To compound things, Jim was a very strange guy. “Eccentric” and “idiosyncratic” are both very accurate descriptors of his personality.

So, here you have me, already a little nervous about this new adventure known as “working” and Jim isn’t helping the situation, despite his best intentions and efforts. It turned out in the long-run; I worked for that company all through college. But it was definitely a shaky start.

By now, you must be asking, if Jim wasn’t the perfect, best, or even really a great person to train me, who would have been?

One of the most important things I’ve found both in training and in being trained is that common ground is a key element of effective teaching and learning. If someone is trying to convey a massive amount of information to you (recipes, specs, procedures, whatever), the little mnemonic devices he brings to the table can be the difference between learning quickly and learning almost nothing. If you put me with someone whose trick for remembering the secret ingredient is that it fits perfectly into the rhyming scheme of the third verse of an E.L.O. song, you’re asking, nay - begging, me to forget what I’ve been told.

One of the simplest ways to create that common ground is to put new employees with trainers who are near the same age. It’s a simple equation. Similar experiences, similar tastes, and similar world-views equals lots of room for common ground. When it comes to creating those nuanced little ways of teaching someone, shared territory is what makes the difference.

The strength of the (often unintentionally) nuanced approach someone might take to training a peer of a similar age is a result of the simple mechanics of learning. If I’m going to try to take in a massive amount of information (recipes, specs, procedures, etc.) I want to learn it from someone who can communicate it to me as closely to the way I think as possible. That means I want someone who will use examples that make sense to me. It means I want a trainer who will refer to things I know about. It means I want to learn from someone who speaks my colloquial language fluently. Sure, if I ask a question I’ll know I’m in the right when I’m told “Nice work” and offered a hand shake, but a “Fo Sho!” and a fist pound offer a whole different layer of reinforcement.

Please, please, for the love of everything sacred, do not take this as my request to middle-aged managers to start adding “izzle” and “heezy” to everything they say. If you do this to me, I’m out. If you say it was my idea, I’m suing. When someone who clearly isn’t supposed to be using lingo tries to use it (you know who you are), it doesn’t create a common ground, it creates a no man’s land. Suddenly, something that was cool and enjoyable seems forced and more time is spent dwelling on the manner in which the information was communicated that the data that was transmitted.

Someone who can speak to my level without talking down to me will be the perfect person to train me because we’re on the same wavelength. That’s why I like being trained by someone my age. Think about it next time you have your new Gen Why training with a much older person. Especially if your trainer is as eccentric as Jim was.