Why Employee Training is Important for Your Business

Have you ever thought about why multinationals and large organisations have become so successful? Their success lies in their workforce. They are highly motivated, continuously learning, and contributing to the company’s growth. But behind all this, those companies train their workforce and prepare them for the market according to their requirements. Guess what? This blog will discuss why employee training is important for your business and how you can do that effectively.   

Employee training is essential in the field of human resource management, and it is an integral part of business development. It is also essential for companies that want to be more competitive and ready in an increasingly uncertain and fast-paced global market. On the one hand, successful companies train their employees particularly to achieve their own objectives.

In our blogs, we often say that employees are the most important asset in modern-day business. And training them is an investment that provides a higher return. However, most growing or small businesses consider them expense rather than investment which is a very wrong concept. And this is the reason many companies fail to succeed in the competition.

Let’s discover together the importance of dedicating time and resources to developing employee skills, which skills to focus on, and how to organise the training process best.

What is Employee Training

Employee training or personnel training is a set of activities that aims to optimise employees’ skills to promote both personal growth and company performance. Through in-company training, personnel skills and knowledge are improved, which also positively affects the behaviour and motivation of resources that eventually impact the entire company’s growth.

On the other hand, employee training is a process of educating your employees according to your company’s communication. Suppose you have hired a resource; will they have your company’s communication strategies? They will definitely not have that; they will have their previous employer’s communication strategy in mind. So, training is the way to educate them and align them with your company’s brand strategy, products, or services. 

Why Is Employee Training Important for Your Business?

There are several reasons why employee training is important for your business, and we are going to discuss them in detail.

Let’s get to the point straight and know why employee training is an important aspect of your HR department.

We might understand why employee training is important for your business with one question. What does company employee training do? Here is what employee training does:

• Employee training stimulates workers’ satisfaction and productivity; with it, they feel appreciated and stimulated to give their best.
• It encourages employee motivation and involvement, with which your business will have a lower turnover rate and will be able to retain and attract the best talent.
• With training, your company will be able to count on more qualified human resources prepared to use more modern tools, favouring the company’s competitiveness in the market.
• Employee training improves your company’s overall performance with the offer of higher-quality products or services.
• Training helps your employees focus on differentiating competitors, which helps you be stronger towards customers, who will consider it more reliable and competent.

Don’t take our word; believe statistics!

According to a study by the Work Institute, effective training plans reduce employee turnover and guarantee stability. Besides, it helps you build a good image for your company. We all know that the voluntary resignations of employees represent an important cost for companies, which the aforementioned study quantifies at over 630 billion dollars a year, with reference to the US market. Think about the market scenario of your own country. Hope that will also be huge, and your company might also suffer from this loss.

Therefore, employee training becomes evident how investment in training has important all-round implications. Besides, you should also understand how the negative effects of a lack of training can impact an economic level. Hope this explains enough why employee training is important for your business.

What Skills to Promote Through Employee Training

For various industries, there are various skills that you need to promote. But they are common in all industries.

Company training promotes the development of new skills by employees, both personal and professional. Thus, the so-called soft skills and hard skills come into play.

Soft Skills

Soft skills are very important for every company and its employees. But the question is, what are soft skills? Well, soft skills are the transversal skills useful in any sector and activity, such as problem-solving, time management, and teamwork. The main objective of developing soft skills is to improve the relationship with colleagues and the company itself.

Employee training that involves soft skills allows personnel to grow and be more efficient, offering better results in less time. Moreover, it helps strengthen the connection between the company and the employees, which eventually makes the employees more motivated and productive.

Among many other soft skill development training, corporate team-building activities are important. It encourages team spirit and develops cohesion among colleagues, such as the ability to work in a group or showcase empathy towards coworkers.

Hard Skills

Unlike soft skills, hard skills represent the training of your employees to improve their technical abilities, such as a new coding language for software development, a foreign language niche communication, or the use of a specific machine. The hard skill-related training is entirely focused on promoting greater preparation of employees on the latest innovations in the sector and works so that human resources make these new skills their own in everyday life.

In most corporate settings, hard-skill training is given for the followings:

• use of specific internal software
• use of the main basic packages
• digital marketing and social networks

It is statistically proven that developing personnel skills through corporate training has a better impact on the activities of the employees. According to a report published in The International Journal of Business and Management Research, 90% of employees strongly believe that training and development programs have improved their job performance.

How To Manage and Organise Training

Now that we know why employee training is important and what aspects companies need to promote. It is time to know how to manage and organise employee training more efficiently and effectively.  

The planning and organisation of in-company training are crucial for optimising investment and company effort. So, if you are thinking about training your employees but don’t know where to start, you should set an effective training plan following two very specific phases.

1. Situation and Needs Analysis

The first phase of employee training management should start with the situation and need Analysis. But the question is, how do you begin? Well, you can start by collecting information both on the company as a whole and on individual employees. And in order to do that, you can use tools such as questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, personal interviews, balance sheets, and official documents.

During this phase, you must not ignore elements such as the overall company’s performance, the departments in difficulty, and the most efficient ones. Besides, you also need to learn about the market and competition trends, the organisational structure, and the training offered in the past. Right after that, you should set the objectives that your company wants to achieve.

Last but not least, you need to decide how the training will be conducted – on-premise or online. Also, set the estimated time for each intervention, trainers, and of course, the evaluation criteria.

2. Evaluate the Results

Result evaluation of training is one of the most important phases you should not miss. It allows us to understand if the training plan has been effective and if we should revise the plan for further training or keep it going for some time.  

The result evaluation is particularly helpful in understanding what changes have occurred among the trainees after the training. You can actually understand the transformation of the corporate climate to the development of new attitudes. And it is precisely the reason to proceed with the evaluation at least three months after the end of the training.

While evaluating, if you find out that the result is not positive, you can always change course by re-evaluating the process and identifying and correcting the errors made.

Hope this explains enough and provides you with the knowledge of why employee training is important for your business. If so, we can easily say that employee training is not just an expense; rather, it is an investment that uplifts your business to a great extent if done correctly with the right tools. In this case, a comprehensive HR solution can help.