Many small companies, tend to view staff training as unnecessary and a bit of a Luxury, when in fact it is Essential for Staff to cope with their workloads, achieve a greater sense of Job Satisfaction (so less likely to leave), satisfied with their work (and so happier), as they are able to get more work completed and cope well with the Ups & Downs of the business’ work flows. It is also a core tool for improving the sense of Staff feeling valued by the business (helping staff retention – which can become very expensive in lost expertise).
Training your Staff is essential in this 21st Century, to enable every single member of Staff to do more work, more easily, perhaps using some technology, rather than just to employ more staff and significantly reduces Staff Waste / Errors / Rework / Boredom.
Training is in fact a practical Investment to increasing the work flow through a your business, enables each member of staff to do more work, better work, in less time and encourages greater team working, flexibility and communication between your staff. What’s not to like?
Many small businesses just see Training purely as cost, as a member of Staff being unavailable for a day or the duration of the training and staff working harder to cover the absence. In Fact, IT Training in particular, tends have a very quick payback as staff are immediately able to do much more work, more quickly, with less errors and less rework. Training your staff in how to use their own IT is even better value than training your supervisors / team leaders how to be professional managers, so they get the best out of all your staff, learn how to create more productive teams and understand how to mange your Staff for you.
One of the biggest mistakes small business owners / directors make is to promote individuals who have been there the longest or are the best at what they do. BIG mistake:
The calibre and competencies required to manage staff are quite different to what is required to do many other jobs in your business and people who are promoted often end up out of their comfort zone and competency zone, which ends up being a disappointing promotion for the staff member who has been promoted and completely demotivating for all your other staff. It is probably one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a business Director. Instead, you need to recognise that supervisors or managers who manage staff in your business are sent on courses to learn manage staff and they return having the Toolkit to manage, support and motivate you other staff, not completely demotivate all your Staff.
Training a small company’s middle managers is also very cost effective, where any of your staff who deputise for company Directors, or supervise teams should be trained how to manage staff – it is not natural to many people, it has to be learned and managing staff is often done badly. which causes staff to become unproductive, increases staff sickness rate and is quickly reflected in Poor Customer Service.
A Manager is someone who get things done through other people, usually requiring a structured approach to delegating, assessing, monitoring and nurturing staff to ensure they all work to complete their assigned work. Thus managers need to not only have technical ability but sound Leadership skills to get the best possible performances from all the individuals in their team, all working together. This also requires an ability to communicate with all your staff, to so that the supervisor or manager can explain all the tasks required, to each member of staff, to ensure that they each understand what is expected of them.
So, Training is actually a core tool for improving the sense of Staff feeling more valued by the business, it is and staff feel it is an investment in them and their prospects in the business.
Finally, as a Director or Owner of a business, if you do not train your staff to be ever less dependant on you being there ALL the time, then you will always be required by the business ALL the time. That’s not the best long term outcome for you, or the business, is it ?