Three Ways to Ensure Employees Know 100%

We’ve all been there. Eking out 70% on a big test. Enough to pass the class, but not enough to feel like you really mastered it.

That might work for us in high school, but it certainly won’t fly in the cannabis industry. Just imagine a budtender knowing just enough to be 70% compliant. That 30% they didn’t learn might lead to a big fine, or maybe a license suspension for your operation. Even beyond potential tangles with the law, it’s imperative that your employees learn 100% of the training material you’re teaching them, in order to keep your business running at its best.

Here are three ways to help ensure your employees are learning everything they need to know:

Make Training Engaging

In a previous post, we discussed the difference between telling and teaching. A great way to ensure your employees know 100% of the necessary material is to make sure that you or the manager who’s providing the training is really teaching, not just rattling off information. In other words: make sure the learning objectives are clear, the material is taught in an engaging and interesting way, and follow up with an assessment (or multiple assessments at regular intervals) to see how much your employees are learning and retaining.

Only Teach Critical Information

Many trainers cram in as much information as possible into a single class. Often times, they include information because they find it interesting or feel important knowing and sharing it. This can leave the audience feeling overwhelmed and unable to absorb what they need. Learners end up struggling to understand what’s critically important and what’s not.

Avoid confusion or burn out by including only necessary information in your course. Teach it in a way that ensures all students will learn all the material if they try. The more you boil down what budtenders or grow technicians absolutely need to know, the more likely they’ll learn and retain the information.

Consider Online Training

There’s a lot to be said for in-person training, but it comes with one huge drawback: consistency. In a field as competitive and high profile as cannabis, you must be sure that all of your employees are taught all the aspects of the material they need to know, from the same perspective, and in an interesting way. Even the same teacher in the same class will have good days and not so good days. But good online training is interactive, engaging, personable, and consistent. Every student is presented with the same information exactly the same way. Plus online courses provide the opportunity to go over material more than once if an employee is having trouble, allows for practice via exercises and simulations, and include built-in assessments to measure knowledge transfer and retention.