Employees who serve orders or do some other job at McDonald’s get trained before they start working but people working at senior positions in my companies don’t. These companies assume that since the person has experience or related education, he will be able to learn about the company and product himself.
Companies invest a lot of money and time recruiting the right candidate but this investment stops after he or she is on board.
Here’s are five reasons why companies should train their employees:
Untrained employees are less productive
Many companies, especially startups keep a track of how many people were being screened and how many actually made to the last round of hiring. They keep numbers for each stage but they don’t have any record on the productivity of those hired employees. They don’t measure what is the progress of the worker towards his actual duties. Even if the low productivity of newly hired employees is brought to the attention of the CEO or executives, they are reluctant to train them because they think it will cost too much.
Employees don’t know
One of the most asked questions in managerial positions interviews is, have you ever fired an employee? But no one asks how you knew he failed to deliver? Many employees who get fired have insufficient knowledge of the things expected from them. Things could have been clear for these employees.
They Quit
These are the two biggest reasons why employees quit:
- They have problems with their manager. Mostly, these people think that there is a lack of guidance, career development and feedback.
- They feel like their learning has stopped and the company is either not investing in new resources or is not giving them a chance to learn new things.
A comprehensive training program can address these problems.
What type of training should you start with
The best type of training to start with is the one which is relevant to them and equips them with the knowledge to do their jobs effectively. We can call this functional training. You should make a tailored course for each department.
Management training comes second. This way you set expectations for your management team. In this training, you should explicitly set all the expectation. What you want from them, whether it is weekly meetings or constant performance feedback.
These are the two basic trainings. Once these are in place, you can go ahead and implement other trainings for negotiating, finance and interviewing.
Enforcing Functional and Management Training
Here are two ways to implement both training programs:
- Withhold any new employee requisition. To improve employee’s productivity and skills, a manager can do things, motivate her and train her. So, until a manager completes training the previous workers, don’t hire more.
- Management training should be done by the CEO. It is understandable that CEOs don’t have time to teach each all management courses but management expectation should be taught by them. For other management courses, choose your best managers.
Many CEOs think putting training programs in place will require a lot of time which could be utilised on something more productive. What they don’t realize is that they are losing a lot of productivity every day by not training their staff.
Training should be an ongoing process in the company. There are endless training programs you can start within your company to improve productivity and increase retention. While the two basic pieces of training should be done by the people within the organization, you can hire a strategic talent advisory firm to develop public speaking, managerial and leadership skills of your employees. These companies perform leadership and growth mindset assessment to help the employer identify his best employees. This way you can also help your other employees recognize their weaknesses so they can work on it to improve their performance.