Training – Invest in and Empower Your Staff

| July 25, 2013

Office Interior Design

Your staff are the most important resource you have. Unmotivated staff are far more likely to take days off sick and are far more likely to suffer from stress and be less productive while motivated staff are keen to learn, take pride in what they do and are more likely to be prepared to go that ‘extra mile’ when circumstances require it.

So having happy and productive staff is beneficial to the well-being of your business and conductive to a pleasant work environment. There is far more to keeping your workforce happy than installing a ping-pong table or monthly office parties as although these might improve short term moral they actually do nothing to empower the individual. Empowerment comes from entrusting and mutual respect.

Despite the recent downturn in the economy it would seem that one thing that hasn’t suffered is company in-house training. A remarkable 92% of businesses asked by the AAT (Association of Accounting Technicians) said that they expect to invest either the same or more in staff training next year than they did last year.

Over half of those questioned consider improving the level of staff qualifications and training to be more than simply of financial benefit citing ‘increased engagement’ and ‘staff retention’ as their primary reasoning.

Having multi-skilled staff brings with it many benefits. A large marketing drive might mean that your usual marketing team or unable to efficiently cope with the given workload but having other members of staff who can help bridge that human resource gap will save the company the money and hassle of temporarily filling that space or going without.

Email marketing training with little green plane would empower that member of staff with the skills they need to carry out such a task and just as importantly analyse and feed back into the strategy the results fed back.

Staff training is becoming increasingly hi-tech too. Whereas once training meant spending vital hours away from, it is now increasingly being carried out remotely via pod casts and e-learning. This flexibility in learning is not just favourable to those undertaking the training but also to the employer.

There are many great reasons to invest in your staff. The benefits are not just to the staff as individuals but to the wider team and ultimately the entire business. As well as allowing an employee to better understand their own role it can also free people from one job to perform another.

 

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Category: Business

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