Staff development is a topic that many often hear and might easily look away from due to familiarity, but how much does it really affect businesses in the long run? Having a well-educated, trained and capable staff complement is unequivocally one of the most important steps to running a successful enterprise.
There are two distinctive stakeholder benefits that arise from staff development: Firstly, the benefits to the business and secondly those to the employees themselves.
For the business
The first advantage is that the business gets to choose what essential skill the employee gains. Targeting a particular skill/proficiency can help the business obtain exactly what it wants and needs in terms of daily operations, plus with sights on long-term goals.
If the business has well trained staff that have the specific skill sets required and also understand the company processes well – then the net result will be better customer service, and improved work safety practices. This all contributes to positive productivity improvements, in a more competent and service-oriented environment.
By training them, you demonstrate to your workforce that you value them enough to invest in them, improving loyalty and all-important staff retention. In turn, effective retention saves you a lot with regards to recruitment and spending of associated resources.
Necessary training and development also improves risk management. For example, training about vital soft skills, areas of conduct including sexual harassment, diversity training and so forth — all serve to mitigate against various reputational risks, internal conflicts as well as PR disasters.
For your workers
Training has tremendous benefits for your staff. They acquire new skills, increasing their human capital contribution to the business as well as building their self-esteem.
The training they participate in can take them into other suitable or strategic positions within the organisation — positions where they can flourish with better prospects and better pay. Furthermore, their skills would be good additions to their curriculum vitaes as they continue to become increasingly skilled.
The fact that they’re upskilled to engage in new and different tasks will keep the employees well-motivated and ‘refreshed’. It rekindles their desire to do their best at their jobs by keeping them challenged and stimulated.
When they note that they’re being trained on your time, they see that you value them enough to invest in them. A good company is seen as one that retrains staff rather than churns out employees who leave their current roles dissatisfied and unfulfilled.
When a business has gone through the effort of developing its staff it will also manage to keep in touch with the latest technological developments, and maintain a strong workforce with growing synergistic capabilities. New systems, processes and advancements are continually emerging and so it is not sufficient to run a one-off training session. Regular training needs to take place to ensure that staff are utilising the available technology and resources as comfortably and optimally as possible.
Proudly brought to you by the National Small Business Chamber (NSBC).