The hidden cost of NOT investing in your employees learning and development plan: The 3 main reasons why training is important to your organisation's growth.
Growing your business is a challenging task, especially when you are still in the early growth stage. There are too many things to do and most of the time our resources are very limited. Most of the time all resources at hand need to be fully maximised. This is one of the biggest mistakes that SME's business owner could make.
Starting a business is easy! Anyone who think they have a great product ideas could do it. But in reality, growing a business is a really daunting task! It is definitely not a one man job, we need all the the help that we could get our hands on.
I have spoken to many SME organisations about their employee's learning and development's needs, and 60% of the business's owners that I spoke to mentioned that they simply can not afford to lose any productive work-time for training. I have spent more than 20-year in leadership position in large organisation as well as growing my own enterprise, I have seen the impact of employee's productivity and competence level to the overall organisational's growth. When the employee's are competence and productive - the organisation become profitable!
Employee's training and development is one of the most important activity that all organisation - large or small need to PRIORITISE! As the cost of not doing is really damaging to the organisation ability to grow and be sustainable in a long run.
#1 Productivity : Lack of training, lack of growth hence lack of growth in the employee's productivity.
Assuming you are generated RM10million revenue per year and you are employing 50 employees. This is equivalent to RM200K revenue per employee ratio. How can you expect this number to grow if there's no growth in overall productivity? The reality is, no matter how committed the employees seems at the beginning, without any training or up-skilling this commitment will reduced overtime. Employee tend to become less efficient, less knowledgeable, less helpful to stakeholders and less productive over time. Training intervention is one of the most effective tool at your disposal to prevent from happening.
“While you may worry about investing in training only for employees to leave, you should be more worried about not providing employee training and those employees stay!”
#2 Change: Lack of employee training lead to lack of change.
There's only one possibility when your organisation DO NOT NEED to provide any employee training at all: Your company is 100% perfect. There's no need for anymore improvement. Your profitability is over the roof and your running cost is way below the expected level. Things runs like a well oiled machine! Does that sound like your organisation?
Run through your financial records, talk to your customers, listen to your management meeting. Does your finances, customers or management 100% satisfied with ALL aspect of your organisation's performance? Does Does every employee operate at a best practice standard? Have all errors been eliminated in your employee performance? When you do not value employee training and development you are succumbing to status quo. Nothing will ever change! When we are operating in a very volatile business environment, change is CONSTANT! Failing to change would means - the END IS NEAR!
If you want to grow and scale your organisation, the organisation need to constantly change and varies its inputs. Unless you are 100% machine operated organisation, changes in your employee behaviours are critical to your business result. And this will not happen without training.
#3 Reputation: When you view training as a 'nice to have' it will damage your reputation in a long run.
When the organisation views training as a ‘nice to have’, not a ‘must-have’, this reputation will damage the brand in In a long run. It would be much harder for your organisation to recruits talents. Talented workers tend to value self-development, lack of training activities in the organisation would discourage them from joining in the first place. Companies who actively promote employee's personal growth, keeping them up-skilled, compliant and up-to-date with the latest technologies will be able to attract higher quality talent. Organisations who don’t measure up with training may as well be stuck with the below average employees.
In summary Lack of Productivity, Lack of Change and Damaging Brand Reputation are the three main reasons why employee training are very important to your organisation's ability to grow and become sustainable in a long run. Having the mindset of we are too busy for training now will hinder your organisation's growth. You might not feel the impact immediately, but the cost is real and it will harm you in the long run.
If you have more than 10-employees, you are most likely have contributed to the HRD Corporation employee training level already, so why not start using it to benefit both your organisation as well as your employees growth.
Digital Dolphin Academy have helped many organisations large or small in their employee's learning and development need. We focuses customised learning solutions to help you improve your employee's productivity and provide measurable and result based learning solutions tailored to your need. You can read more about how we have helped other organisation in here and talk to our learning consultant on how can you start your learning journey.
SALINA SALLI
Founder and Principal Trainer
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