Sometimes it’s difficult to see the benefits training might bring to your business.
All too often we’re focusing on the short-term cost of something rather than the long-term value of it. And where training is concerned it’s made doubly difficult to see the value because there’s often a time cost as well as a monetary one getting in the way. If you’re a retailer for example, taking staff out of store for a day’s training might reduce the ability of that store to deal with its daily trade. Replacing them with staff from another branch might only be shifting the problem from one location to another. Of course you could ask staff to attend training during their day off, but that might not be so well received if people have commitments, plus you’ll probably have to pay them an extra day (on top of the cost of the training!) or arrange for them to have a day off in lieu. Managing staff through a period of training can be seen not only as costly, but actually as a real hassle so it’s perfectly natural to want to leave it until later.
Maybe next year then…
What we often fail to see, however, is the cost of inaction: the cost of not signing your staff up for training; the cost of not investing in their development or career progression. For example, let’s say you take on a new employee who shows potential at interview stage. What steps do you take to unlock that potential a year down the line? Do you invest in their career development or do you just let them get on with it? And what about the employees who’ve been working with you for many years? How do you keep them challenged and engaged with the business as it strives towards new goals? How do you stop bad habits from setting in and holding the company back? How do you motivate your employees to stay with you?
If you’ve lost good talent recently it could be because you’re not nourishing it. Likewise, if your staff are happy just doing what they’ve always done, and if that’s not really working for the business any more, you can’t let it continue. How costly is it to allow bad habits to fester?
Training can help.
Firstly, Training helps unlock potential, not just with new starters, but also your experienced employees. Training can show people how they can achieve more. It can open up new ways of thinking, new ways of working – in sales, for example: finding new business, negotiating better deals, retaining customers and building loyalty. Training can expose bad habits and eliminate them, turn them around and promote positive change. It can change minds, attitudes and beliefs and it can re-invigorate, motivate and inspire your team to take ownership, solve problems and see the value of working towards the goals of the business.
In short, training raises the talent bar of your team and aims it towards driving your business forward. Great training helps employees become the heroes and champions you want them to be.
Isn’t there a danger you’ll pay money to train them up and then they’ll leave, taking their new-found skills elsewhere?
We find that, more often than not, the opposite happens. Feedback tells us that not only are employees keen to put new skills and insights into practice during a great training program, they feel much more valued by the business and inspired to be a part of it. Great training makes people feel good about themselves, more confident, more valued and more secure in their work because you’ve brought about the means for talented people to show that talent, to use it and be the best that they can be.
So yes, there is a cost to training. You have to spend time and you have to spend some money. But it’s less costly in the long term than not training, and the gains can be significant. In fact, investment in the development of your employees through training could be the ultimate difference between you and your competitors.
Have a look at this case study from one of our valued clients, the premium hi-fi retailer Audio T to see how they felt our training program added value to their business.
We weren’t brought in because their staff were under-achieving. We carried out sales training with them because they wanted to continue being leaders in their market, because they wanted to be better than they already were.
Now imagine what the world would be like if there was no training…
T21 Training 