Training Employees: 3 Most Important Lessons

Employee training can have profoundly positive impacts that go far past the bounds of risk management, though, including improved productivity, efficiency and engagement among staff members.

Here are three of the most important lessons you should be teaching your employees in training programs today:

1. Cybersecurity
The Wall Street Journal reported that employee error became the most popular source of data breaches in 2015, citing statistics from a study completed by the Association of Corporate Counsel. This translates to roughly 30 percent of all breaches occurring because of an employee error – not even counting insider threats. Employees have purposefully gone into systems to steal valuable data from their employers.

Make sure you are training your employees in the best practices of cybersecurity. This includes how to spot spam email, malicious websites, and the best practices of password management.

Let’s say a major hurricane hits your company. Sure, insurance can help to foot the bill for some of the damages, but can that coverage completely erase the losses due to an outage of operations? How will your customers respond to your brand if it does not properly handle emergency response and management responsibilities in the event of a disaster?

Make sure that your employees are not only well-versed in your policies related to disaster response and emergency management, but are prepared to carry out their responsibilities in these adverse situations. Consider combining classroom-based training with experiential activities, effectively simulating a disaster and allowing employees to practice responding properly.

This could mean holding a planned outage of core systems and evaluating how employees respond.

3. Technology
Whether it is communications devices or data storage systems, technology has become more centrally important in the average workplace. However, your investments into technology are not going to actually come back with returns – let alone high ones – should your employees not understand how to use them and why they are useful.

Always make sure you are training employees in each of the solutions, tools, devices and other technologies entering the workplace as early on as possible.

Better, more comprehensive employee training can have dramatically positive impacts on your company’s risk mitigation and operational performances.

Training resources
Employee training can be tricky to get a handle on, but these sources can help you to gather the knowledge you need to succeed:

• ATD: The Association for Talent Development offers extensive information on employee training best practices.
• Training: Training Magazine provides blogs from professional development experts.
• CLO: CLO Media hosts a range of news articles and other content from learning leaders.

Article from Selective Insurance Company