Ten Ways Training Can Improve Your Business
Staff training and development are a crucial investment for any business. Here’s ten reasons why well trained staff can save you money and grow your business
1. Increase Productivity and Efficiency - By training staff to do their jobs, less wastage occurs due to errors and lost time.
2. Increase staff morale - Investing in your staff helps them realise their potential and feel valued by the organisation, creating a happier working environment.
3. Foster Innovation - Staff feel more confident and valued by the organisation and are motivated to make suggestions for improvement, development new ideas or apply theory learnt via training.
4. Decrease staff turnover - investing in your staff’s potential increases their loyalty to the business.
5. Staff are more motivated to do their jobs - Increased confidence in their ability to do the job.
6. Less absence due to stress and illness - because staff are more motivated to do their job, the knock-on effect is that they are less likely to take time away from the office through stress and illness.
7. Technical Skills and specialist knowledge is kept up-to-date and new techniques are learnt.
8. Training helps improve the competitive edge a business has by encouraging the development of new techniques and fostering an innovative environment.
9. Training is essential to ensure legal compliance as legislation is updated and new legislation is introduced.
10. All of the above 9 reasons add up to result in INCREASED PROFITS.
Liverpool Chamber offers a range of training opportunities for local businesses to develop the skills of their staff through gaining relevant qualifications or through one day business skills seminars. Find out more here.
Yes, yes, yes, yes . . . and six more yesses. Whole-hearted agreement from this side of the pond. Also - Jack Phillips has several books out on calculating the ROI for training (such as How to Measure Training Results, Return on Investment in Training and Performance Improvement Programs, and The ROI Fieldbook.)
Allow me to also point out an article I wrote a few months back on the huge financial benefits companies realize when they have good training programs, but often miss noticing the those benefits simply due to no line item for it appearing in the budget.
(Note - all my columns on workplace excellence can also be found at the management-issues.com site)
Best Regards,
March 5th, 2007 at 3:40 pm- Dan Bobinski
Company Website
Workplace Excellence Blog
You have indeed noted some important points about the benefits of training for organizations. However, it is also important to note that any long lasting and effective training must be significantly meaningful for the trainee. They must not only see an opportunity to seize upon advanced professional skills but also see the training as an asset or a suite of asset skills that they can absorb, personalize and take with them through their career. Training must impact not only behaviour but also attitude. It must be a powerful conduit to moving that person in a powerful and empowering manner. Whether that new learning will then transfer effectively to the workplace depends on many factors about the host organization. For example, its culture, management style, learning rituals, reward systems, succession planning structures, politics and so on. We should not always assume that the learning from training automatically transfers into the workplace. Indeed, most training does not transfer which may in part be due to the inexperience of the trainer and/or the attitude of the organization arranging the training, or both.
Often training is just a cathartic exercise and with very little ROI for the host organization because the organization is not able to absorb the new learning. Certainly low-level training, which involves for example, making and packaging a “widget” in a factory type setting is not what I am meaning. Here you are trying to teach simple behavioural cause-and-effect tasks. However, where training is more complicated and requires the individual to be creative, think independently, communicate effectively, mange themselves, manage diverse resources and manage others better and so on then, I would argue, it is the organization that needs to take responsibility for absorbing just such change or reabsorbing the changed and enlightened individual.
Certainly it is our belief that training should lead to change at a number of levels for the individual trainee namely behavioural, emotional, cognitive, attitudinal and spiritual, for example and this change needs to dovetail with a concomitant strategic, operational or structural change for the host organization to absorb that new learning. Our own training programme provides just such a systemic and conjoint approach taking into account the psychological contract between the organization and the individual being trained and ensures that the transfer of knowledge happens immediately. We ensure this by getting a guarantee (prior to the training event) from the organization that it is ready and able to absorb the “new” changed (trained) employee. This raises training to another level. In fact, it is a tacit agreement that is made formal and where both the trainee and the host organization are committed to direct and immediate transfer of learning. This methodology and value holds true for all 28 training events that we provide, no exception. The employee knows that what they embarking upon is a serious endeavour and not just some time off disguised, in their mind, as “away days”. Moreover, the organization also is tasked to ensure that they are ready to absorb and take advantage of new skills and learning. If this contract is not agreed we don’t deliver. Simple as that.
Remember attention spans degrade quickly and it is common to forget 80% or more of what you learned in a training session a week ago. A month later one may barely remember the training consultants name.
Training is indeed valuable and the points you have raised are important ones but I would just add that training is a transaction between the individual and the organization and many organizations are either lazy about knowledge transfer in this regard or use training as a disingenuous way of “motivating” employees and keeping them sweet and compliant. Organizations are also naïve in the sense that if the training is advertised and promoted in a provocative manner internally and the consultant delivering it is “all singing and all dancing” then that knowledge and skill transfer will happen automatically. Trainees are much smarter that this and should be given much more credit by the organization and the training consultant.
Training is a commodity purchase. Therefore, like any other commodity that we purchase both the trainee and the organization should be good consumers and ensure the best value of their time and resources for themselves through measurable results. Ostensibly, a dynamic transaction with mutual benefits for professional and personal growth for the individual and a measurable (financial or non-financial) result for the organization. This contract should be made clear though pre-negotiated operational definitions and milestones and so on for both parties. Anything less is just a great day out.
When we speak about training lets not forget the benefits for the trainee. If they don’t buy it, the organization will not get it.
Norm Murray
CEO
Human Technology Limited
http://www.htlorg.com
See also our product entitled ProTacit?regarding Psychological Contracting in the workplace.
March 12th, 2007 at 5:26 pm