Too often small-business owners ignore the value of providing a formal training program, focusing instead on worrying that the employees they invest time and money into are just going to leave anyway.
What About If Your Customers Leave?
Inadequate training is THE biggest underlying reason for the scarcity of great customer service. Are you trusting a client who generates $100,000 with $100 worth of training?
Doing it Yourself to Save Money?
Another bad idea. Many entrepreneurs, focused solely on the bottom line, mistakenly think they can save money and do the training themselves. What business owner has that kind of time? To be effective training programs need to be structured, relevant, proactive, regular and consistent.
Training is Your Ace in the Hole for Recruiting and Retaining Top Employees
Training programs get employees to think about their roles as not just a job, but as a career. When given training they get to see you in a new light too, not just as another boss, but as the catalyst who care enough to give them tools, support and actionable items to help them achieve important career goals. Your employees will be excited knowing that:
- they are in integral part of your company, actively engaged with solving problems and finding win/win solutions
- you are confident in their skills and abilities, and that you care enough to invest in their future, and
- grow and evolve with the assurance that, as long as they are contributing to your overall success, their future is secure working for you.
Employee training can start out small and doesn’t have to be a huge expense. Case in point is the customized in-house workshop Sun Country Developments recently underwent for leadership staff the Kamloops and Penticton senior care residences. Operations Manager Martin Gardner was delighted, saying they found the content to be well-structured, relevant and extremely useful, leaving with a better sense of understanding and purpose… see more
Top 4 Strategies to Ensure Your Employee Training Program Has Lasting Effects
- Owners and senior executives should be trained too. To ask accountability of our staff, we must be willing to look in the mirror and think about what we too could be doing to improve our leadership skills, hence what is happening in the workplace.
- Wherever possible do skill and competency assessments. Individual assessments uncover common short-comings and/or causes for weak performance, that you might not otherwise know about, and help to ensure that you choose training that is both targeted and meaningful to the employees in question.
- Make training a ‘scheduled’ activity. It doesn’t have to be an all day affair, it just has to be regular – repetition is needed to reinforce the development of new skills.
- Follow-up your training with group performance evaluations:
- Where are they best utilizing the training they received?
- What are the individual and group take-aways?
- Botton Line: Is there a demonstrated ROI? Well thought out training programs, built upon your company’s solid foundation of core values, is a win-win solution paying back unbelievably big rewards in customer service, employee attraction and retention, team work, productivity and personal accountability.
Training is one of the best ways we know to hire and keep customers and your top performing employees.
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Barbara Ashton works with businesses to recruit and retain powerful employees – Triple-A Level talent, who excel at winning customers, honouring accountability and increasing your company’s bottom line.
An enthusiastic champion of sustainable leadership, and with close to three decades in hiring know-how, Barbara brings refreshing insight and perspective to her work with leading employers throughout the BC Interior and Western Canada.
This post has been approved for public release by Barbara Ashton. All certified posts carry this Google Authorship link to Google.
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