Investment in Employee Development: 5 Reasons Why It’s a A Whip Smart Business Decision

We all like the sweet smell of business functions performing optimally at their 100%, right?

But then, even with the best resources, and top technologies & techniques, it’s almost impossible to near 100% efficiency. At least until we learn the art of leveraging our human resources correctly.

No matter how talented your employees are, if you don’t nurture and train their abilities adequately, your business will be losing on a lot.

It’s a simple equation.

Business’ quality ∝  Employee training & development

And it isn’t about just one reason that backs this statement. There’s a big bunch of benefits that your business will avail by training its employees correctly.

For starters, we are talking about 5 of those. So, buckle up and read on.

#1. One Fine Way of Attracting and Retaining Talented Employees

While there used to be times when money was the major factor attracting talented employees, candidates have now started looking beyond the bill.

This is the age of man where the employees prioritise better career opportunities, work culture, scope for improvements and learning over or along with money.

Certainly, to sustain as a company with impeccable talent, you’ll have to start focusing on employee development. Speaking of how it’ll help you attract and keep your most valued employees, here’s a small list.

〰️ Employee Training = Direct Benefit to Employees:

One simple fact about employee training is that it is a direct benefit for the employees that are being trained.

Think about it. If your organization is going to work on an employee’s professional skill assessment and development, this knowledge and training is going to stay with them wherever they go.

It’s clearly an asset that they may not get many chances to earn.

Also, offering employee training and development as a part of the job package will place you above your competitors hiring for the same position as you.

〰️ Employee Training Doesn’t Just Train Employees. It Makes Them More Loyal:

It’s true that our behaviour towards our employees largely determines their loyalty towards us (employers).

This simply means that the better you treat your employees, the more loyal they will be towards your organization.

And one sure shot way of making this happen is by providing them adequate training. This will make them feel more confident and more valued as employees of your company.

As a result, they may stick with you passing the tests of time.

〰️ Companies That Provide Employee Training Earn A Better Reputation:

Goes without saying, companies that value their employees and focus on honing their skills are considered more reputable than those that don’t.

And you know what good reputation means, right? In simple words, more demand and interest among potential employees/candidates. Also, this is one way of making it to the good books of your customers and prospects.

Everybody likes brands that are coordial over the ones that are not.

〰️ By Providing Employee Training You’ll Be Attracting Good People:

While a good pay package may attract a huge lot of candidates, with the provision of employee training, you’ll be attracting the cream of them.

The ones who want to improve. Work on their skills. The eternal student kinds, joining your organization so they can be better and use those skills for your company’s benefits as well.No wonder, why investing in employee training is a really good idea.

#2. Employee Training Produces Better Managers

One of the biggest long term benefits of employee training and development is that if you train your employees adequately, you won’t have to worry about hiring managers in the future.

How? Well, here are the answers.

• Employee training and development program will help you create a pool of capable employees
• Out of this bunch, you can pick the employees that are most suited for a promotion 
• An employee training program will also make you aware of your employees’ strengths and weaknesses

By making your fresh hires go through an employee development program, you’ll be providing yourself an option of promoting your trained talents.

From a business point of view, nothing can be better than this, as by hiring seniors and managers from within your organization you will be saving yourself the efforts of training new managers.

Also, as these employees would already have an experience working in your organization, they’ll quickly get a hang of their roles and responsibilities.

This saved time can be invested in other important business functions.

#3. Boosts Engagement Among Employees

As a manager, you would know how it can be a bad idea to let employees be bored.

Although, it’s crucial to let them have some time off while working, letting them get bored in most cases backfires bad. The reason is that such boredom can make them lazy, kindle negative attitudes in them and give rise to several sloppy work habits.

This will directly affect your team and work place’s productivity.

Your best bet? Keep themselves as engaged as possible. It’s one simple way of implementing the required workplace discipline.

Plus, it’ll keep your employees active throughout their office hours so they feel more productive and can focus better on the tasks at hand.

And then, most importantly, the time that would have gone into boredom will be utilized for adding value to your business and its precious assets; your employees.

#4. Boosts Your Company’s ROI

We all know how some investments pay off well and some investments don’t, right?

Employee development is one investment that pays off well and for a good span of time.

Basically, the amount of money that you invest in employee training and development will come back to you as business that these well trained, confident and engaged employees will bring for you.

Gives you a monetary vision, right?

Well, that’s the beauty of employee development. It doesn’t only help you attract and retain talent, but also encourages them to use their capabilities and skills optimally towards their roles and responsibilities.

This efficiency is the reason why you’ll have to invest less money for hiring new employees. Clearly, this will give a boost to your company’s ROI as you’ll be making the same (or maybe more) amount of money for a smaller investment.

Also, employee development has the potential to increase sales. By using the Best LMS for HR Professionals, you can make your employee development and training chores easier than ever and train all employees proficiently at the same time.

#5. Employee Development Prepares Your Business For Scaling

If you are investing in employee development and training, you are certainly making your way into the club of companies using modern equipment for management. And hence, you are saying yes to the future.

Don’t get it?

In simpler words, by training your employees and working on their overall development, you are making sure that they are ready for facing all sorts of challenges that your organization may have to come across at the time of scaling.

Also, you can use employee training for upgrading your employees’ skills and talents according to the upcoming technologies and trends.

For example, a decade ago, companies weren’t that aware of how digital marketing worked. So, what did they do? Didn’t sit ideal for sure.

They started upgrading their arsenal. Training their employees. Hiring new talents with the right skill sets for handling their digital marketing processes.

Introducing them to the latest set of tools and paraphernalia that go into marketing a product, service or business efficiently. And everything else that happened.

Seems like a smart move, right?

Well, smart enough to work for all businesses and industries. So, don’t let go of the chance and prepare your business and employees correctly for the future scaling.

Challenges Associated With Employee Development and Training

Employee development is cool. Employee development is effective. Employee development is the way to the promised land and a world of other quotes. Fine! We get it.

But, does it come so easy? I.e., can you just wake up one day choosing to train your employees right and make it a fix on day 1?

Umm! Maybe. Maybe not! The point is that there’s a sea of challenges that stands right after you make up your mind for implementing an employee development program. And as you work on it, you must know what those challenges are.

• Hectic Employee Schedules: We know how packed our employees’ schedules are. Occupied with tons of work. Deadlines. Responsibilities and a whole lotta trouble coming in from one place or the other.
  
  Amidst all of this, encouraging your employees to make time for a development program will be plain  cruel.
  
  Which is why, it’ll be better to pre-plan how you are going to tackle this problem.
• Dispersed Workforce: Another reason why making employee training and development happen successfully is a dispersed workforce.
  
  With a number of employees working from home, working on different locations and at different times, coordination can become a serious challenge.
  
  This is why employing a qualified learning management system is crucial for companies.
• Varying Learning Pace and Habits: It’s no secret that every person has their own pace of acquiring and processing information.
  
  For example, if a person ‘A’ takes one hour to read and comprehend a piece of information, the person ‘B’ may take two hours, three hours or even fifteen minutes for that matter.
  
  Clearly, this can cause a disturbance in the learning flow in a batch of employees that opted-in for an employee development program.
  
  Using a learning management system and eLearning authoring tool can help you keep such problems at bay.
• Irrelevant Training Material: Another reason why an employee development program may fail is irrelevance of the training material.
  
  You may have the best intentions behind introducing an employee development program in your organization and an irrelevant course material will pull down all the goodness like 1-2-3.
  
  Obviously, who would want to learn about things that are not useful and/or relevant to their respective industry?
  
  Think about it and before you develop your company’s eLearning course for training and developing your employees, make sure all the content is properly categorised so the relevant pieces are presented to all learners.

While introducing an employee development program in your organization is a brilliant idea, it may cease to perform if not implemented correctly.

To help you save yourself from things that may bother you, we mentioned a bunch of challenges. Now, let us have a look at some important employee training and development stats that matter the most.

Important Employee Development Stats That Every Employer Should Check Out

So, here’s a quick list of some interesting employee development stats that every employer must go through.

•  25% of employees would be more satisfied at work if they were given the opportunity to do what they do best; 
•  Only 37% of employees indicated they were “very satisfied” and 51% “somewhat satisfied” with their jobs; 
•  Training and development spend has risen by 15% in the last year (2014) alone; 
•  Spend on corporate training has grown to over $70 billion in the United States; 
•  Research tells us that over 70% of learning on the job occurs informally; 
•  The State of the Industry Report found that businesses are providing employees with an average of 32.4 learning hours per year; 
•  40% of employees who receive poor job training leave their positions within the first year; 
•  68% of workers say training and development is the most important workplace policy. 

Stats source: Clear Company (blog.clearcompany.com)

Final words

As the innovations in the field of employee hiring and management have started to rise employee development and training has become a priority for employees. This simply signifies that they don’t just ask for money, but a better learning experience as well.

This is reason enough for companies to add up a smarter mode of employee management; employee training and development.

In this post, we talked about why it’s crucial and what are the challenges that an organization may have to face.

Hopefully, this was helpful.

Costa.

CakeHR is an award-winning HR software company that provides attendance, performance and recruitment management for customers worldwide. More information at www.cake.hr