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Why training should be the last thing you cut

Guest post by: Kathleen Quinn Votaw

Article Overview: An organization I'm familiar with anticipated doubling its size within a year and, in order to manage the change that growth would bring, put in a new layer of management. Five vice presidents were installed, all of them promoted from within. Rather than effective planning, this turned out to be disastrous for the organization. Morale disintegrated. Turf issues and tempers began to flare in the formerly supportive environment. And productivity plummeted. Why? None of the VPs had ever had management training.

Why training should be the last thing you cut

An organization I'm familiar with anticipated doubling its size within a year and, in order to manage the change that growth would bring, put in a new layer of management. Five vice presidents were installed, all of them promoted from within. Rather than effective planning, this turned out to be disastrous for the organization. Morale disintegrated. Turf issues and tempers began to flare in the formerly supportive environment. And productivity plummeted. Why? None of the VPs had ever had management training. The practice of promoting people with the strongest technical skills, the most tenure, or the most outgoing personality is unfair to the team alienated by poor management, and to the person who is promoted and loses all self confidence-not to mention the costs of increased turnover and lost productivity. Underfunding, reducing or cutting your training and development budget, in either good times or bad, can put your business at risk.

After all, if people are your most important asset, why wouldn't you continually make investments in their value? As Jack Welch puts it, "An organization's ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage."

Employees stay and leave for the same reasons

The opportunity for career growth and advancement is consistently one of the top three reasons people stay at companies. The lack of it is a primary reason for leaving. (Surprisingly, 89 percent of employers mistakenly believe employees leave for more money, according to author Leigh Branham, when the reality is that about 12 percent do.) In addition to saving the costs of replacing people-estimated to be 150 percent or more of total annual compensation-there are many benefits to establishing and maintaining a robust training program. And they all lead to better performance.

Depending on the focus, training and development:

•Ensures that people can do their jobs effectively

•Increases employee motivation

•Increases efficiencies in processes and systems

•Inspires innovation in strategies and products

•Cross-trains between departments and across regions (a safety net when you lose staff)

•Lowers risk management (in areas like sexual harassment and diversity)

•Increases productivity

•Improves customer relationships

•Helps maintain a competitive advantage

And there's more. Training and development is at the heart of succession planning. At its essence, succession planning is a systematic process where you identify, assess and develop your staff to make certain they are ready to assume key roles in the organization. These "high potentials" represent the future of your company. Top talent never stays with the status quo; they demand the opportunity to learn, grow and progress. And they are the people you can least afford to lose.

Training fits any budget

There must be as many reasons for training as there are ways to make it affordable. You train as part of orientation; when a performance appraisal indicates the need; to benchmark performance improvement; develop leaders; educate about specific topics . . . the list of training and development needs is long.

Training does not necessarily mean sending people across the country to attend seminars and conferences, although sometimes that's appropriate. Training can be as simple as a well-defined and executed mentoring program. By offering first-hand experience and personal knowledge, your senior people can be some of the most effective trainers in your company. (And some of them will need training on how to mentor effectively.)

Training and development does not have to lead to an immediate move up the ladder. People can be challenged by developing additional skills and taking on challenging new responsibilities in their current positions. Online courses and internal workshops presented by knowledgeable in-house specialists or local subject experts can satisfy the need for education, motivate, and stimulate thinking and innovation for very little cost.

All it takes is creativity and a commitment to learning that reflects your organization's strategic objectives and goals.

Far from luxury

Training and development is often viewed as a luxury or nice-to-have benefit. That is a fallacy. It's a necessity in the minds of your employees, and especially the talented employees you want most to keep. Employees create your products, deliver your services and make your organization run. If they perform poorly, how well can your organization perform?

You can actually save money and improve your bottom line by investing in continuous training and development, no matter what the economic environment is like. Reallocate your resources and adapt the delivery of training to your current economic circumstances, but don't slash your training and development budget away-ever! You'll create a more sustainable long-term business by giving your people one of the things they most value-and demonstrating in a tangible way how much you value them.

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Article Tags: recruiting, recruitment
Referred by: http://www.salesleadershipdevelopment.com



Related Forum Posts
Training - Louis: Some regulated industries mandate that you attend training. However, even then, finding time to meet those requirements becomes an issue. This may explain the growth of tele-seminars. To answer your questions though, ROI is very important and everyone needs to sell or market no matter what they do. The best tip I ever got on training is not to pitch training as training b/c even big companies have limited budgets for training but training rebranded as "sales support." It makes the ROI argument that much more appealing. Hope that helps. Good luck.
Home Depot Training - Hi Louis, From December's Inc. Magazine Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus devoted 10% of their time to training. They did it at the beginning and kept doing it as the company grew. "The most important thing to remember is that you must be actively involved in all of the training that goes on in your company. The fire of the entrepreneur is very difficult to translate down the line."
One Thing To Note - As a trainer myself, I'm always amazed at the lengths organizations go to to pay for training and then not follow through. Any training I design myself has to have at least an offer built in for future support as well, for the benefit of those receiving the training, the organizer and the people the trainee works with. Corporates don't seem to like this too much - they often seem to want to budget, sign it off, run it and close it off. I'd always ensure that there is the offer of ongoing support/challenge/development in some shape of form. Not sure what Louis or any other training providers find...
Re: What Keyword research methods do you use? - It's a little outside the box approach, but I use Google's own Instant Search to pull up initial list of keywords. Then I click on each search result to go deeper. I use them something similar to forming Ad Groups for Adwords. If I want to build an authoritative site, and my niche happens to be "dog training", I will build pages for "dog training collars", which will be built on "how to use dog training collars", "dog training collars on amazon". Then start second group, which consists of "dog training schools"... This way, I will be building more authoritative and complete site for "dog training". I will build pages according to the structure I made up for each group, using WordPress. Start building links back to these pages, and over time, I can build a site that harnesses the power of organic search results. I have done this "tedious" process among a few of my sites and they have been proven effective.
Training and Self Development - It's interesting to me that the latest StatsCan study shows that the majority of ongoing professional development training is paid for by large corporations. Yet, at the same time it is small business and entrepreneurs who need to invest in this exact training in order to remain competitive. So why is it that we are not taking ongoing professional development training? Is it time? Money? No perceived need? I'd appreciate it if you could take a second to answer the attached poll.


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