Why Investing in Employee Training Always Pays Off

 

Investment made in employee training always pays off

The importance of training the employees is not emphasized in most of the organization. The idea of implementing a strong training and development system is of less priority, because of the fear of high training cost involved in the entire process. But in reality, it is an indirect type of business investment, which ultimately leads to a good pay-off for the organization in the long run. Investment in training is always fruitful and the time and the money spent on it are worth it for both the employees as well as the employers. Setting aside a part of the available budget for employee development is the need of the hour, no matter how big or small the business is. This will ultimately help the organization in many ways.

                                        https://youtu.be/8cnr49QWidg?si=J1pvqOBbV3S0sfnI

Employee retention

Employee turnover is the biggest worry in most of the small organizations and businesses. An employee, who is not well-trained, leaves the organization in a very short span of time. Every year the company loses a lot of money due to attrition. If the employee leaves, the cost involved in finding and inducting a new employee and teaching him the job, is relatively high when compared to, training the existing employees as per the job and project requirements. It is cheaper to train and enhance the existing employees, rather than replacing them with the new ones.

The urge to feel valued for their work done, is the expectation of any employee in the organization. The organization can create a room for self-improvement and appreciate them for their smart work and their knowledge skills and attitude.

If a company has a proper training and development program in place, then this can act as a hiring benefit, which will differentiate it from its competitors. A proper Induction / on boarding program creates a sense of belongingness and loyalty in the mind of the employees. It also gives a feeling that the company cares about the professional development of their employees.

Promote people internally

Promoting people from within the organization is much safer than getting people from outside or hiring externally. This holds good for most of the managerial and critical positions of the organization. Generally, the performance of the external hires is not that significant when that compared to the people who are promoted from within. Moreover, the external hires demand for a higher pay than the existing employees, and are more likely to quit within a year or two. In other words, getting people from outside generally means, paying higher salary to the not so significant performs, who tend to resign in a year or two. The employee who has been in the organization for quite some time will be in a better position to take up the managerial position, as he has the complete knowledge and information about the business and its expectations. He who is already in the system can understand it faster and can be trained even faster on any other specific requirements of the role. And through the employee development programs, the managers can find out whether the employee is a management material or not and also gauge his strengths and weaknesses.

Helps in creating career path

Any employee will be looking out to see how his future shapes up in an organization. By creating long term training programs, employees can chalk out their career development and this may also lead in succession planning for the critical roles of the organization. Thus it becomes easy to promote the employee when any critical person leaves the organization or whenever there is a promotion taking place, the employee who will take up his position can also be easily identified.

Enhance Customer service and Satisfaction

An additional pay-off of training the employee is the competency to handle business customer and client efficiently and serve them better than before. A happy and a satisfied customer becomes a loyal customer. He starts trusting and respecting the brand and does repeated business with the organization. The employees who are in the front-ending or customer facing role have a edge over their competitors , when they are well trained and educated on the organizational values, vision, mission, goals, business, systems, compliance , safety, ethics and laws. This helps improve their soft skills, negotiating power, sales techniques, etc. thereby gaining and happy customers. A company can create niche position through customer satisfaction skills.

Enhances employee engagement and performance

High performance is linked to higher efficiency and productivity. The employees who are more engaged at work are the most productive ones. Regular training helps increase employee engagement, as they feel that the company cares about their professional development. Poorly engaged employees are less serious about their work, which leads to lower productivity rate and this affects their work relationship with the co-workers, management and also their customers. These training programs create a challenging environment and a scope for employee to move up the organizational ladder and accept greater responsibilities towards their work related projects. It also helps then add new job related duties and work functions to the current role. Through proper training employees stay well informed about the latest technologies and trends and are able to handle any critical situation at the work place, without much supervision and are able to respond quickly by taking  faster decisions. Hence they become more skilled, informed, productive, effective, efficient and valuable in the organization, and this leads to higher level of motivation and morale in the organization.

Conclusion

the investment made on employee training helps the organization not only achieves a competitive edge over its competitors, but also saves lot of monetary resource, reduces accidents, decreases supervisory and administrative time and cost, increases employee productivity and satisfaction, helps in employees retention or reduce employee turnover rate, stay compliant of laws, build the talent pool, and customer satisfaction. On the contrary, if an organization fails to invest on its human capital, it may face a strong threat to lose its business to the competitors, face revenue loss, delay in rolling out new products and services, less competent employees, and many more. Periodical and well planned training is an investment which will pay off in multiple ways

References

1. Noe, R. A. (2017). Employee Training and Development (7th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education

2. Goldstein, I. L., & Ford, J. K. (2002). Training in Organizations: Needs Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (4th ed.). Wadsworth.

3. 
   

4. Saks, A. M., & Haccoun, R. R. (2015). Managing Performance through Training and Development (7th ed.). Nelson Education.

5. 
   

6. Blanchard, P. N., & Thacker, J. W. (2013). Effective Training: Systems, Strategies, and Practices (5th ed.). Pearson Education.

7. 
   

8. Phillips, J. J., & Phillips, P. P. (2016). The Business Case for Learning: Using Design Thinking to Deliver Business Results and Increase the Investment in Talent Development. Association for Talent Development.

9. 
   

10. Cascio, W. F. (2018). Managing Human Resources: Productivity, Quality of Work Life, Profits (11th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.