Making Sure Training Ensures Growth

When we’ve done the work to provide the right training, understanding that not just any training will help us capture lost profitability, we should be seeing the results show up immediately - through how our team members get things accomplished and in our bottom line! Here’s how an article from Chron.com called Effects of Training on Employee Performance detailed the impact we should be seeing:

Companies can reap the rewards of providing training for their employees because well-trained workers help increase productivity and profits. Investing in employee training should improve worker retention rates, customer satisfaction and creativity for new product ideas. Effective training saves labor by reducing time spent on problem-solving and saves money in the long run by producing a better workforce.

Investment in training can improve a company’s financial standing. Poor performance often results when employees don’t know exactly what they’re supposed to do, how to do their jobs or why they need to work a certain way. Training can help solve these performance problems by explaining the details of the job.

This should reduce duplication of effort in the workplace, the time spent correcting mistakes and the problem solving necessary to correct bad performances. Improved performance from employee training can reduce staff turnover, lower maintenance costs by reducing equipment breakdowns and result in fewer customer complaints. Better performance from employees typically creates less need for supervision and brings increased worker output.

While I believe the author captured the true importance and tangible value of training as well as I’ve ever seen, we cannot simply send our folks through even the most tailored training and expect everything to magically fall into place afterward. As leaders, we need to be very intentional about ensuring our investment into the training and the team members who participate produces a measurable return. This can never be a check-the-box exercise! 

After working through each of the profitability killers we’ve addressed here, I’d expect many of you involved in this process with me to ask, “Why would anyone even consider just going through the motions when they know all the ways they’re losing profitability and have worked so hard to identify the training their team members need to grow?”

My response is simple: I don’t think they do consider it! I believe that all too often the basic steps necessary to realize a significant return on the investment we make into any type of training get brushed aside due to all the other busy-ness we deal with in running a business… As we wrap up this look at how the wrong training kills profitability, we’ll close by walking through two very practical things we can do to ensure any training we provide for our team members is applied and yields the results we need.