A Competent Workforce Sustains Your Competitiveness
“If we train them, they will leave” – a well-recognised fear in many organisations. In fact, in most cases, they will stay and you get a great return on your training investment. However, if they do leave, that may not be such a bad thing. When someone leaves your organisation, it makes room for another member of staff to grow into the vacancy and perhaps for someone new to join your organisation. Furthermore, recruiters will now know that you are a company that invests in the development of its staff, which is great PR in return for which you begin to attract new and eager talent.
This is the people aspect of continuous improvement and sustainable change – the confidence to challenge how we have always done things. When you pay attention to your employees and help them develop into confident, motivated, and skilled individuals they will pay you back with commitment and loyalty which will extend to how positively they talk about your company outside of work.
Imagine for a moment that you do not train them and they stay! Then you are standing still with stagnating thought processes, outdated skills sets and the inability to change. If you want something different, you need to do something different.
Strategy Before Training
In today’s highly competitive market, the quality of your staff from operators to senior managemers is critical and no one is exempt from learning and developing. This applies to both hard and soft skills.
Before you train anybody, regardless of their level and position in the organisation, you must have decided why. Training and coaching for the sake of it, to simply satisfy corporate KPIs is a waste of time and money. If you take people out of their productive working day, perhaps pay overtime for colleagues to provide cover, and pay an external trainer to deliver the course it has to serve a specific strategic purpose with clearly defined benefit expectations. Training and coaching must be linked to achieving your corporate goals.
WBS trainers always ask the delegates at the start of a training course why they think they are getting this training. Too often, the trainer gets a mixture of blank stares and comments like “I don’t know”, “they just told me to attend” or “because my boss thinks I’m rubbish”.
Whilst this may just be expressions of poor attitude, there is usually no smoke without a fire and the communication before training started cannot have been effective which points to a different issue. Does the organisation suffer from poor communication in general or does it not know what to communicate?
My Manager Should Have This Course
WBS hold one 100% record. Since we delivered our first training course 15 years ago, at least one delegate on every course delivered since has commented on our anonymous feedback form that management or senior management should have this course.
When you design your strategy for change and decide on the training and coaching requirements, it is crucial that you also include all levels of management. This shows commitment to the rest of your organisation, that continuous improvement and change is important, and that it is supported and will be measured.
There is no leadership if no-one follows and to get your staff to embrace and actively sustain change and continuous improvement, management must be included in the training and coaching strategy.
How WBS Can Help
No two organisations are the same and WBS only deliver customised training tailored to your specific change requirements. Together we agree the key elements of the training and the level the training should be aimed at depending on the audience.
Our training workshops are highly interactive and rely on delegate participation using examples and situations from their working day.
In order to reinforce the learning, we facilitate a follow-up workshop at a suitable interval after the initial training. In this workshop, the delegates will share experiences on how successful they were in applying the learning and the trainer is on hand to provide further support and mentoring.
To find out how we can support your training and coaching requirements, please contact us today for a FREE no obligation consultation.
See Examples of Our Customisable Training Modules and What Our Clients Have Said Here