Don’t let bad training lead to high employee turnover

Blake Cook believes there is a direct link between proper employee training and worker retention in the agrifood industry.

Cook, CEO of Do Process, discussed ways employers can better set up new hires for success and sustained employment while speaking during a TechTalk at the 2025 International Production & Processing Expo (IPPE) in Atlanta, Georgia.

“People don’t leave a company just because someone else is about to pay them more money. People actually leave their job more likely because they don’t know how to win at work. If we can start to prepare these employees and extract proper training and hand that to them, and put them with the right tools, they will stick around more,” he said.

Cook said he has spoken to numerous supervisors who say they spend as much as 40% of their time training staff members to do tasks they should have done during onboarding. When they don’t learn the right things early, it can lead to a lot of mistakes, and ultimately cost the company money.

“Making mistakes is another reason employees quit,” Cook said. “You don’t want to be foolish. You don’t want to not know how to do the job, and when you don’t know how to do every piece of the job, you make mistakes and you go, ‘well, this isn’t for me.”

Tap into senior employees’ expertise

One resource that employers often overlook is tapping into the knowledge of the workers who have been with the company the longest, as well as those who consistently perform well.

Those people “have a treasure chest inside their brain,” Cook said.

“The valuable information inside of your company is not in a written manual. It’s not in the PowerPoint presentations. The best stuff inside of your company is tucked away in people’s brains that have been there for some time,” he said.

“The best place to start is to interview your top performers. You know who your top performers are, and the best place to start is to just start extracting that information and get that out of their heads first. Because the reality is, they are going to either retire, quit or get fired, and all of those goodies are going to walk right out the door with them.”

 And as you extract the knowledge from the skilled and experience staff, apply it to a mode of training that it site-specific.

“Global training, and what I mean by global is these generic trainings when you’re onboarded, is killing our employees. They’re bored out of their minds. …  Make the training and the stuff that you’re taking out of this job specific: This piece of equipment, this software that we work with, this machine, this lockout tag. Whatever it might be, make it site specific.”

Once that knowledge of senior workers – something Cook describes as “intellectual property” – is extracted, make sure that information is passed on to newer workers in a manner that is easy to understand. Ask yourself if a fifth-grade student could understand it. If so, you’re on the right track.

Make training accessible

Another thing that makes training effective is its accessibility. Can your team members access the needed information when they need it?

Cook says training materials should pass what he refers to as the bull riding test, referring to how in the sport of rodeo, a bull rider must stay on for eight seconds in order to make a qualified ride and earn a score.

“If an employee can’t access a training within eight seconds of hitting a device, a tablet, a phone, a desktop, they’ve fell off the bull,” he said.

A common problem with written manuals, SharePoint servers and Dropbox files is that employers have “almost made a game of hide and seek.”

He said if someone wants to learn how to make a good casserole, today they often go to YouTube or TikTok and find instruction videos.

If it works for cooking tips, there’s no reason why it won’t work with employee training information, Cook said.