I attended a training this week with focus on rooms (front desk and housekeeping) operations within the hotel industry, and was amazed by what I learned. It was not so much the knowledge and expertise shared by the instructors, but the way how it was shared with the group. We had over 80 attendees in the training, and the instructors would divide the group into smaller teams of five to ten participants maximum and rotate them from one exercise to the next, so that the training would be much more intimate and personal, and everyone could try hands on what was discussed and learned just a moment ago.

I always believed my meetings and trainings to be resourceful and effective, and I realized now that I should rather invest 50 hours in training my team by dividing into smaller learning groups, than wasting 5 hours in a much bigger group with close to no effective outcome at all.

If you follow the learning pyramid below you’ll understand that by just standing in front of your employees talking about processes and standards and showing pictures, you’ll only reach about 20 % of your team, no matter how good of a trainer or facilitator you are.

If you’re fed up with wasting yours and everyone else’s time and money, and want to start training your employees effectively, then you need to follow the  CODE or EDOC principle:

Explain (prepare the employees, give an overview, break the whole into parts, step by step, easier parts first)

Demonstrate (in clear view, do it for them, show & tell, re-cap key points)

Observe (let them do the whole job, provide assistance, let them make mistakes, have them teach you)

Coach (tell them how they did, give effective feedback, let them practice)

In one of our trainings a vendor of our company that supplies us with cleaning equipment had us dismantle a vacuum cleaner and put it back together to better understand how it works and what to do if it stops working. Seems like a silly training for department heads, but we had fun and believe it or not, we learned something along the way.

My initial thought was that it was a silly idea to have a training of 20 minutes about our vacuum cleaners and that we actually would have to do it hands on rather than just showing it to us on a power point in only two minutes. But something as boring as learning about a vacuum cleaner was suddenly fun and informative, and then it hit me, I am the stupid one for never having conducted this training myself in this way with my team, neither with the room attendants nor the housemen.

But you cannot do the training with a group of 30 employees, you need to break them down into smaller teams and have them try it out for themselves.

It seems like a more cost and time intensive way of training, but again,  you should either do it the right way and have your employees benefiting from it, or don’t do it at all.

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