Invest in training your people… and reap the rewards.

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By Kristen Harper, Controller and HR Manager and Kassie Lyons, Accounting Specialist at Kenton Brothers.

This year at Kenton Brothers, we’re investing in our employees to become better humans. That’s a lofty goal so we’re breaking it down a bite at a time

Joe CalhoonAt the beginning of 2019, the staff at Kenton Brothers starting a 10-month training program with Joe Calhoon with a focus on customer service and leadership. Joe has worked directly with Stephen Covey, author of teaching “7 Habits” and “Principle-Centered Leadership” and specializes in working with businesses of all sizes to build their customer service skills and teach a community servant mentality to all organizations.

Strengths Assessment

We starting the training with every employee taking a Clifton Strengths assessment. Joe helped us understand how our strengths make everyone uniquely qualified to serve. We also learned how understanding our coworkers’ strengths will help us communicate better with each other internally.

People who focus on using their strengths are three times as likely to have an excellent quality of life and six times as likely to be engaged in their work.

One of the key attributes that Joe has been teaching Kenton Brothers is that in ‘doing service’ people are happier. By giving remarkable service to our customer, our customer is happier and is better able to serve their customer. We reap the benefits of knowing we have done our job well.

The Power of Training

By doing this training, Kenton Brothers is not only wanting our staff to work better with our customers, but also to be able to have better positive relationships with everyone in our lives both inside and outside of the workplace. Joe taught us through personal stories and illustrations that have made him relatable to our entire team.

Additionally, our management team is working through Emotional Intelligence evaluations.  This specifically helps each individual understand where they need to improve upon different emotional strengths and how to help them better evaluate problem solving, lead staff and support the organization as a whole.

Kenton Brothers is deeming this insightful training of our people our best investment ever as it is creating a stronger culture, forcing us all to look deeper into the meaning of what we do and how we communicate with each other for the overall goal of proving the best experience possible to our customers.

Thank you to Joe, as he is a living example of what he teaches and we’re a better team thanks to him!

Kenton Brothers Technician Skills Matrix

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Every service-based company knows that their technicians play a vital role in the business. They’re the personnel that sometimes spend more time interacting with the customer than anyone else at the company. Kenton Brothers recognizes this and believes that the more highly trained our technicians are, the more prepared they are to help the customer implement the most secure and easy to use system.

Training

In order for our technicians to provide top notch installation, service and programming we must provide top notch training and opportunities to hone their skills.

The first step in preparing our technicians was to create a matrix of all the skills they will need to become the ultimate technician. We broke our matrix down into 5 primary skill sets: Mechanical, Access Control, Cameras, Intrusion Alarms and Professionalism. Each skill set has 4 general columns: Installation, Service, Programming and Engineering. Each column has a list of tasks that can be rated from training needed all the way up to skilled enough to train others.

Kenton Brothers: Technician Skills Matrix

With the technician skill matrix created, we intend to have every technician new and old evaluate their skills for each task to let us know where they feel confident in their skills and where they feel they needed more training. This will allow us to create a training program customized to each technician that will help them develop their skills. It also gives the technician a visual representation of what level they are at as they go through their development process. As they master one task, they can focus on the next, to work their way into the highest position they aspire to.