Accounting for Business Success: Making Training Hours Work

It may seem that there’s no time for training. It just doesn’t seem like the cost benefit is worth it. You would have to take multiple working people off of their jobs in order to move knowledge around, and you don’t see any real benefit to that in the short term.

However, short-term thinking isn’t necessarily the best thinking, and specifically when it comes to training, you’re much better budgeting short-term time for long-term gain. To show how this works, consider the four following areas before totally dismissing any possible training opportunities within your companies billable hours segmentation.

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Knowledge Transfer                                  

Knowledge transfer is at the heart of any training session. One person knows something. Other people need to learn it. But there never seems to be the right amount of time to schedule those training sessions, so they rarely happen. However, if you research knowledge transfer benefits, you’ll see that it can be a huge disadvantage to not having gone over a lot of this material if an employee decides to leave the company, and he or she is the only person with that skill set. That can be a gigantic loss, especially for a small company.

Realistic Time Budgeting                                       

Start by thinking about realistic time budgeting. Two hours of training takes two hours. You can’t smash it in 30 minutes and expect it to stick. Remember though, that two hours of training can allow a potential trainee to help the company for years to come. That is the perspective you have to approach it from, and that’s why it’s so important to set up a training schedule to allow as much time as possible for this to occur.

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Keeping a Healthy Employee Culture                

No training is going to make it through the ranks to disgruntled employees. If they see no benefit to learning a skill set, there’s going to be no motivation behind their actions. This means you have to bake in some sort of benefit, like the potential to more into a management position, or get more or better hours. People respond to positive reinforcement, and with training that’s especially true.

Keeping Communication Lines Open                   

Also, if employees don’t feel as though there’s an open line of communication available through company ranks, training isn’t going to go as well as it could either. You can do everything from making a suggestion box to allowing open questions every once in a while at meetings, but they have to feel like they have some sort of voice in order to business to proceed with the fewest road bumps. Business success often relies on the efforts of a majority of employees feelings as though they have some degree of positive interaction with the overall company policies.

 

Ken
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