Invest in training for your team

News: January 2013

Invest in training for your team

In the current trading environment, budgets remain quite tight. Businesses are focused on return on investment (ROI). Therefore employee training needs to focus on providing individuals with opportunities to achieve their goals within the business. Without this type of training, your employees may be unable to meet the needs of the customer and may struggle to achieve their goals. This can lead your employees to become frustrated and leave the firm as a result. To boost productivity and to increase employee satisfaction, businesses need to invest in the right training for their team.

Don’t make assumptions

When designing a training programme for your staff, don’t assume that they have a certain level of ability. Just because they may have come from a rival firm doesn’t mean they know everything. As such, it is often best to assume that they know little or nothing and start training with the very basics. As they are likely to initially find this easy, their confidence will be boosted. As the training begins to focus on more demanding tasks, your team will be confident enough to bring their skills to the next level, thereby offering greater ROI for the business.

Talk about training

In order to truly understand the training needs of your team, you need to communicate with them. If your employees have been complaining about their lack of training it probably means that they need help with certain areas of their jobs. For management this means one thing – listen to them. Understand what they need and what they are lacking so that you can provide them with better tools to fix the underlying problem.

Keep it focused

Focus the training programme on what’s most important to the business right now. Don’t try to fix every problem in one go. Identify a major business issue and address it. This could be anything from problems arising through a lack of communication, poor customer service or perhaps it is time to teach new sales and business development skills to your team. Encourage the entire team, even those doing things right, to embrace the training program.