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WHY COMPANIES FAIL TO TRAIN THEIR EMPLOYEES

Training is Too Expensive!

We frequently hear that training is too expensive. The real question is this: What is the real cost of not training your employees? Objectives get pushed back, causing costly delays in every department.

“An investment in education always pays the highest returns.”

Too many companies view training as an expense rather than as an investment. All jobs have a specific deadlines, revenue and service expectations. When missed, what is the real cost? Customers are frustrated and leave us. It immediately creates more time in meetings with managers to discuss the situation, provide updates and set new deadlines. Often companies don’t account for the amount of money that it costs them to hold a meeting. Given the investment companies make in compensation, this could cost more than a few thousand pounds per hour of meeting time. The next time you are sitting in one of these types of meetings, figure out how much each individual is paid to attend the meeting, the expense might surprise you. With the right training in place, more often objectives are met and these meeting can be minimized.

High Turnover

Companies are concerned that if they train their employees, the employees will leave the company. This is simply not true. Trained employees tend to stay longer with their current employers and get more gratification from the work they are doing. There are many other intangibles of training. It improves employee morale and employees feel important in their roles. If training is also part of the benefits package, it will help attract stronger candidates for employment.

Training Takes Too Much Time from Production

Most training classes and schedules can be customized. Many companies can work around scheduling challenges and accommodate training and productivity objectives. For example, rather than have a 5-day (8 hours per day) class, make it a 10-day (4 hours per day) class over a two-week period. The employees can attend class in the morning and then work in the afternoon. By using internal facilitators the training can also personalize training so that it is very specific and the employees can be trained on exactly what they need. When managers are involved in the training of employees, they can easily monitor the actions of those employees being trained

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WHY COMPANIES FAIL TO TRAIN THEIR EMPLOYEES

Companies Don’t See the Long-term Benefits

Not only will training help improve internal processes; it will also help with external customers. Outstanding service is very important for external customers. With full-time employees, it benefits them and the company to be timely and accurate on their projects. With the right training, the employees will be more confident, more productive and a better employee overall. Perhaps the best way to think about Training is like proper dental hygiene, you only have to take care of those teeth you want to keep and stay healthy. The tradeoff of failing to train your staff will manifest itself in productivity losses, employee turnover and employee morale. While investment in your staff is always a challenge, if you have a technology based business, training is essential to the health of the organization because of the rate of change.

“What’s worse than training your workers and losing them? Not training them and keeping them.”

Many companies provide some sort of introductory training or orientation for most of their new employees. It may take the form of an older employee assigned to show the new employee "the ropes." Or it may be left to the HR department or the individual's new supervisor to show them where the coffee pot is and how to apply for time off. Others let you sign hundered of forms and play silly games like skittles, musical chairs, paper plane throwing, and then call this One2One, getting to know each other, but definitely not trained for the job at hand. Many organizations, especially in government and academia, have created new employee training that is designed, exclusively or primarily, to provide mandated safety familiarization. Yet some companies in highly competitive industries recognize the value in New Employee Orientation (NEO) that goes much farther. They require several weeks or even months of training to familiarize every new employee with the company, its products, its culture and policies, even its competition. dodie ste®eo p®odu©tion ™

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WHY COMPANIES FAIL TO TRAIN THEIR EMPLOYEES

There is a measurable cost to that training, but is it worth it? Let's look at some of the issues.

Some Background Facts

The technology in the workplace is changing very rapidly and companies that can't keep up will drop out of competition. A survey by a Skills Development Office found 63% of the respondents planned to "introduce new technology into the workplace that would require staff training." A third of the respondents included "improving employee job performance" and "keeping the best employees" as desired outcomes. The BRITISH Society for Training and Development (BSTD) reports that less than ~ UK£750 per employee was spent for training in 1996. The largest part of that (49 percent) was spent for technical and professional training. Only two percent was spent for New Employee Orientation and three percent on quality, competition and business practices training.

Reasons To Not Do New Employee Training

Even at the less than ~ UK£750 per year for training an employee I reported above, it is still a cost. For some companies, especially those with traditionally high turnover, it can be a major expense. If your profit per employee is less than ~ UK£750, it would be difficult to convince the stakeholders that training is justified. Besides, we all know it is the responsibility of the school system to train people to be workers. And it is the worker's responsibility to learn how to do a job so they can get hired.

Why Do New Employee Training

Not surprisingly, all the reasons not to train new employees (except cost itself) are actually reasons to do that training. If you have high turnover, training new employees will make them more productive. They will feel better about themselves and the job. They will stick around longer. If your profit per employee is less than ~ UK£750 per year, you have major problems. You need to start training all your employees, not just your new employees, right away. Show your stakeholders the potential ROI of the training as we will discuss below.

And if you still believe that our schools provide adequate training to make students labourready you are living in a dream world. Yes, some job seekers make the effort to learn on their own the skills needed for a new job, but most get that training on the job. dodie ste®eo p®odu©tion ™

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WHY COMPANIES FAIL TO TRAIN THEIR EMPLOYEES

Required Training

Government regulation, insurance coverage, and common sense dictate some training that MUST be given to every new employee.

Other Reasons for New Employee Training

Profitable companies make a commitment to training for their staff because they "recognized that the training and development knowledge, attitude and skills of the staff and agency field force are fundamental to its continued efficient and profitable performance.” Other smart companies realize it is important enough to include in their list of benefits for full and part-time employees.

An Interesting Proposal

In my honest opinion I would recommend companies make training a stand-alone function, separate from HR. I recently read that out a twenty percent increase in training expenditure since 1983 has not kept pace with the twenty-four percent increase in workers in the same period. And Training Managers should use Return on Investment (ROI) to demonstrate that the training function is a profit centre, not just a cost centre.

Summary

It has also become a standard now that companies such as Sprint, Xerox, General Electric and General Motors have opted to establish Corporate Universities, reflecting the importance they place on employee training. The value for smaller companies is arguably even greater. And there is no better time to start employee training than New Employee Orientation.

The G4S fiasco has highlighted not just a failure to recruit enough peoples to cover Olympic security, but also a failure to properly train their staff. The media is awash with G4S applicants recounting stories of their scant training with only 10 days before the Olympic start date. But how common is lack of staff training and what are your employment rights on this kind of situation? Well, for starters it's more common than you think. The UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) recently published their skills survey of 85,000 employers and found that almost 1.5 million of their employees did not have the skills required to perform their job role.

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WHY COMPANIES FAIL TO TRAIN THEIR EMPLOYEES

Managers were the surprise losers, with only 45% of managers receiving any training. Two out of every five employers had provided no training at all of their employees in the past 12 months. The most common reason for not training was found to be that employers considered their staff to be proficient and/or did not need training. But the main barrier for training was shown to be the financial cost. A lack of proper training can have a disastrous impact on your career. I have seen many instances of employees at all levels being subjected to disciplinary action by their employers for poor performance, but at the same time with insufficient support, training or advice having been provided by that employer. If poor performance is caused by a lack of knowledge or experience, it a basic premise of employment law that this should be addressed with training or guidance in the correct area. By law, the employee must be given reasonable opportunity to be taught the skills and given the knowledge needed to carry out the job. Losing a customer because a form was not filled in correctly, or because you were not made sufficiently aware of technical or regulatory requirements, is extremely unlikely to amount to a fair capability or conduct dismissal by an employment tribunal. But remember, what an employer may consider as suitable "training" may vary from your own understanding and this may frustrate your ability to put up a case. It is not always the provision of tangible training such as external courses or trainers that will apply. Many employers will incorporate training policies in their staff handbook and direct you to read it. In larger organisations, there is the company's internal intranet that will set out the appropriate polices which you will be expected to read and adhere to. You would be hard pushed to say you were not aware of your employers’ specific training requirements if you are properly directed to where the training material could be found. Conversely if your employer does not make it sufficiently clear where their training material lies, they could lose a case. In many cases, of course, an employer cannot hide behind written manuals, especially where there is a hands-on role similar to the G4S security staff. I am nevertheless always amazed how many employees are not aware of the existence of staff handbooks or what information their company's intranet holds when their employers had previously made clear where this important information lies. You may want to check this out. It should also be remembered that within the first two years of your employment, you cannot make a claim for unfair dismissal if you are dismissed for poor performance (the time dodie ste®eo p®odu©tion ™

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WHY COMPANIES FAIL TO TRAIN THEIR EMPLOYEES

period is one year if you started work before 06th April 2012). So despite a lack of training, you would not be able to raise a legal case. Assuming you do have the qualifying period of employment, regardless of whether you have received suitable training or not, your employer would be expected to give you an opportunity to improve and if necessary implement a performance improvement plan. At least two written warnings should be given if a formal disciplinary route is instigated and you should have the right to appeal a dismissal. A failure to follow this process can amount to unfair dismissal and that's even before the lack of sufficient training argument is put forward. Naturally a lack of management training is going to have a wider impact as the fallout will filter down to the staff who report to that manager. The Department for Business Innovation and Skills produced a report only recently highlighting that ineffective management is costing the UK economy UK£19bn in lost working hours, and that 43% of managers rate their own line manager as ineffective. G4S and their lack recruiting and training of staff are in the public eye because of the huge importance of needing to get it right for the Olympic Games. But day and in and day out, other companies don't get it right either. Remember, though, you do have employment rights if your employers lazily fail to properly train you. Have you had experience of not being properly trained or working for managers who needs training themselves? I know I have!!!!! My personal experiences in the past Has been that it is better to have less well trained, above the average wage manpower, than more untrained national minimum wage employees.

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WHY COMPANIES FAIL TO TRAIN THEIR EMPLOYEES

DON’T INVEST – DON’T EXPECT

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