This month we tackled the topic of internal training, and by now your teams should be ready for social media use, and aware of how to be concise in the space. Whether integrated into their daily tasks or not, what happens when the training is all done, your employees are out engaging in the space and someone does something that goes against outlined guidelines? What do you do then?

Correct Mistakes
Let’s face it, we are all human. We all make mistakes, from small ones like forgetting to CC someone on an email to large ones like tweeting out that uber secret company password instead of entering it on your login page. It happens. It will send panic through your body everything single time it does, but the sooner you can breathe deep and realize it was just a simple mistake, the sooner you’ll be able to recover.

Be Prepared
The best way to get over mistakes happening is by being prepared for them. You can do this by creating a crisis management document or by simply listing out all your biggest fears about your employees being in social media and then listing how you would overcome them. This can be a great exercise to do as a group to understand the mindset of your team. Maybe someone is terrified of mistyping or misspelling a word. In advance you could help them devise a plan to double check their tweets before sending. These types of plans will help to improve your reaction should something go wrong.

Don’t Over React
It’s probably the hardest thing not to do when something goes wrong, but when you have a crisis such as a misstep by an employee in social media, the best thing you can do is not over react. Even though we are all living in a real time world, take 10 minutes and clearly outline what your next steps will be. If you’ve previously created a crisis management plan this is a good time to open it up and review what you had planned out to do. Keep in mind, whatever is happening can be dealt with, it’s merely a matter of taking the time to plan out your actions and response.

Learn from the Wrong
No matter what goes wrong, you need to learn from mistakes, errors and just plain unfortunate events. After something happens, make sure you take the time to bring in your team to break down the situation and see if they can decide from their training where the error occurred, how it could have been avoided or what needs to be adjusted for next time. Learning from your mistakes is not just an old saying but something you should practice to improve your social media training.

Adjust your Training
After you’ve tackled the crisis, broken down the situation and learned from what went wrong, make sure to go back and adjust your training so that new employees benefit from your experience. Don’t just consider changing the content that you discuss with your employees but also the timing of that discussion. You might learn that employees felt rushed in the amount of time that training was completed in or that they felt certain areas we’re sped through. Whatever the case make sure you are looking at both content and delivery of your training.

Since we’re always looking to improve our process we’d love to hear about the ways you’ve overcome internal training missteps. How have you overcome challenges? Have you adjusted your training content and timing? What is the top lesson you’ve learned?

Tags: internal training, Social Media