Team members on a sales training workshop from Gates Group, an organisation INVESTING in their staff.
How much time, money and effort do you invest in your staff? Yes, I appreciate that you pay them a wage or salary, but is that it? If you consider the notion that staff are one of the most fundamental and crucial parts of any business, then surely you should invest in them?
So how do you do that? Well for a start, when did you last TRAIN your staff?
There is sometimes a big ‘fear factor’ about training staff within organisations, which, whilst I categorically do not agree with it, I can understand it, to a degree. One of the biggest fears is that once the staff member has been trained… they can then take over the boss’s role! You could argue it stems from perhaps being insecure in the role of the boss!
Training is synonomous with development.
Many of you will have heard this conversation between the Managing Director and The Training and Development Manager? For those that haven’t, here we go:-
Training Manager; ‘We really should be training our staff’.
Managing Director; ‘But what if we spend all that money on them and they then leave’?
Training Manager; ‘What if we don’t train them and they stay’?
I’m sure many of you reading this will have experienced working for someone who had this attitude, or scarily enough, maybe they just could not see the benefit in training. Given that many of you reading this will be the retail industry, statistically, the main reason consumers do not return to a shop, pub, supplier or organisation, is not down to the product or product range, the location or even the price; it’s down to staff attitude. Now what this effectively means is, you are employing staff, paying them a wage, and they are scaring off customers!! Not only that, but those customers are going out of their way to tell others. Sound ludicrous? Well I can tell you it is happening right NOW.
Another huge assumption is that if you train staff initially when they join the company, then that is it; the rest they simply ‘pick up as they go along’. But have you noticed how your industry has changed massively over the last 20-30 years… and yet we still, often, do not recognise a need for up-skilling and refresher training. I’ve often used the analogy of a fully qualified Heart Surgeon, who did their training 30 years ago and has performed plenty of transplants. If you were about to go under the scalpel…. with the knowledge that they had not up skilled or re-trained in all those years… how confident would you be? EVERYONE needs ongoing training, as the job, products and environment changes, although bizarrely (and this has always worried me a little)… once you have passed your driving test at 17, you have no more training or refreshers for over 60 years! Is it any wonder that maybe that is a contributory factor to so many poor drivers on the roads and so many road accidents and deaths?
How many Managers ‘stress’ because they do not delegate or empower their team?
So what is the true cost of NOT training your staff? It’s an open ended answer and depends on many factors, but what has been proven time and time again is that without training, you are not getting the very best out of your staff. So what training should you undertake? Well look at it another way; What is it you would like your staff to do that they currently are not doing?
Legislative Training should be carried out, regardless of the size of your business, so Health & Safety and Fire Safety training needs to be a regular part of your training and whilst many can view this as a ‘cost’, I believe it to be an investment. It is far far less expensive than actually having an accident, together with possible fines for a breach of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.
You may want to take a look at business specific training, perhaps your own stock control methods or ‘till’ training, just to decrease the amount of ‘No Sales’ rung up on the till?! Generic training, which again, should still be tailor-made to your own business can include Sales training, Customer Service (yes I know this is a quick win for most organisations, but in my opinion, we are generally appallingly bad at this as a nation), you may even want to look at PEOPLE or MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT training? It’s not just the football world that has mind-blowingly brilliant players that produce very poor Managers or mediocre players that turn into brilliant Managers! An incredible observation in business is the amount of times a person gets PROMOTED to a management position, often because they are VERY good at their job… and fall flat on their face! The amount of training given, if any, is minimal and yet we expect this person to hit the ground running, which clearly is a BIG ask. New Managers tend to want to come in and ‘make their mark’, changing things instantly. Now, I am all for CHANGE… but change to improve, not change for the sake of it.
How much training is purely carried out as a ‘tick-box’ exercise?
If the person has had the fortune previously, to work for a GREAT manager, then a lot of those skills will hopefully have been picked up, yet I have seen it time and time again, where superb employees are given management roles, with no support. That ‘failing’ then infects the whole team and those with a little ‘get up and go’ tend to do exactly that… GO! Those that remain generally fall in line with the poor standards, failings and under-achieving that often go with the bad manager. Consider who has really failed though, the newly promoted manager or the company?
Organisations invest in premises, IT systems, products, marketing (sometimes!), and other essential items, but staff training is often neglected. Why not make time NOW to invest in your most important asset?
It’s not about cloning our staff into being super slick sales people, but rather enhancing their skills, updating their knowledge and motivating them to achieve even greater success, for both themselves and the organisation.
If you would like to explore the training aspect of your staff but are not sure where to start, then give me a call, under no obligation, and we’ll have a conversation.
For more details of workshops that can help YOU and YOUR business, simply contact us on info@imduk.com
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Gary Boyes – Director
IMD (UK) Limited
IMD UK 