How to maintain long term employees

How To Maintain Long Term Employees

Copyright (c) 2009 Alan Gillies

Training has become an indispensable activity for every business, and no one can deny the incredible benefits that businesses can reap from it. Some of us might ponder on the need for investing in training our existing employees when we have the option of hiring new employees that are already highly skilled. The easiest and most logical counter to this question is that the cost of hiring a new employee is much higher than the cost of training your existing workforce. So, what would you do now?

Training may be considered to be a major investment in the beginning, but the variety of benefits it delivers to the company is incredible. To stay competitive, and for sustained growth in our ever-changing market, a business needs to keep its workforce trained and highly motivated. Such essential employees are considered to be important assets — playing crucial roles in the long term success of businesses everywhere.

Let’s have a look at the benefits that come from training the workforce:

1. Increase Productivity — Effective training will eventually result in an increase in the productivity of the staff in any business. Trained employees can utilise new techniques and systems when dealing with their day-to-day work, thereby enhancing their accuracy and efficiency. Increased accuracy and efficiency will — by definition, automatically increase the overall productivity of all business operations.

2. Increase Morale of Employees — Training boosts the attitude and morale of the staff. Training will, over time, minimise the reluctance of employees towards future changes in the organization. People will form a positive attitude towards training if they can clearly see its relevance and the benefits it brings.

3. Decrease Staff Turnover — It has been observed that trained and motivated employees are the ones that serve a business for a longer period of time — as compared to others. As a trained employee is content with his job, he is far more able to coordinate his ambitions with those of the company.

4. Workforce Flexibility — Training aims at developing different sets of specific skills in employees with the goal of making them more flexible, so that they can be engaged in a wider variety of activities. The idea is not only to make the workforce effective and efficient, but also to make it multi-tasking or specialist in nature.

5. Decrease Costs — Does it really? Yes, training can definitely lead to a decrease in various business costs. Training saves money through limiting waste — whether in time or material, limiting the supervision expense and reducing the number of workplace accidents. Trained employees can perform diversified sets of activities single-handedly.

So, irrespective of what sort of business you’re in, the number of employees you have, or the size of your business — Train to Gain!