Employee training is one of those things that everybody universally agrees to be a good thing. The problem, of course, comes in terms of execution. Yes, it may be a good, sure, but it can also be expensive. As ever, with a small-to-medium-sized business, it comes down to priorities.
Given a limited supply of funds, what do you want to focus on? Do you delay the product launch in order to find money to see to the training of your people? Do you cut a few QA/QC corners to find the money? Something, somewhere has to give. Choices have to be made. Unfortunately, when it comes time to make those choices, training is usually the thing to get cut from the equation because it’s not seen as mission critical. At the very least, it’s not seen as being “as critical” as the new product launch or QA.
Sadly, however, a lack of training can hurt you in a number of ways, all of which can drag your bottom line down and possibly put your company in the red. The first problem, and the one that’s most obvious to the eye is that an un-trained or ill-trained employee is relatively inefficient. There are often clear and marked productivity gains to be had, simply by virtue of proper training. When all of your employees are well-trained, the machine that is your company operates at a higher level. It makes your entire operation more effective and efficient. There’s a lot to be said for that.
The second big issue you’ll see when training begins to slip is the fact that the work your un- or ill-trained employees do will be more prone to error. Those errors have a creeping effect on your cost structure. The more of them there are, the lower quality product you’ll produce, relative to your competition. You can get around that, of course, but only at the expense of more time spent on QA/QC, which can be both immensely time consuming and quite expensive. Neither of those amounts to a win for you.
Finally, and perhaps most damaging, is the fact that an un-trained or poorly trained workforce is one that’s likely to see you have relatively more customer complaints than you’d otherwise have had. Those complaints can hurt you in a variety of ways. First and foremost, they can lead directly to lost business. Let’s face it, nobody likes to lose a sale, especially when it could have been prevented simply by properly training your staff.
The second big impact you’ll notice though, comes in the form of a constant, grinding PR issue. Unhappy customers tend to leave negative reviews online to express their dissatisfaction. Those reviews have to be dealt with. If you simply ignore them, then in addition to losing sales, you’ll come to be known as an unresponsive company that doesn’t care if its customers are unhappy or not. That’s not a good strategy to ensure long term success. Worse still, the problem won’t go away simply by responding to the negative reviews. If you don’t address the root cause (training, in this case), then you’ll have to keep refighting the same battle. Not a happy situation to be in.
