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Laura Burton, our in-house L&D specialist, covers how to develop an effective L&D programme for the colleagues in your organisation and why it’s important to provide training for your employees.
Let’s start with the Richard Branson quote: “Your employees are your real competitive advantage. Take care of your employees and they will take care of your business.” Obviously, there are lots of ways to ‘take care of your people’, with wellbeing initiatives and flexible working arrangements, but this article is solely looking at the positive impact training has.
“Let’s be crystal clear, investing in training is going to produce results and often quite quickly” outlines Laura. “How many businesses DON’T want to improve productivity, employee retention, quality and employee satisfaction? Training delivers all of this. and more!”
With statistics like it costs 6 to 9 months of an employee’s salary to replace them, there’s an immediate impact if training is something your people want to access, but can’t do so through your organisation, so they end up moving on.
Often businesses will use annual reviews or personal development plan meetings to extract the training requests of their staff. This could be through the lens of the manager who has seen a gap in knowledge or through a requirement to improve a certain skill. Or it can be from the team member’s desire to learn something new, or to refresh their knowledge in a certain area. This is a perfectly acceptable way to get started with creating an L&D plan, however, if you want something more formulaic or proven there are steps that can be implemented.
Indeed have a 5-step suggestion which is as follows:
Let’s dive into these steps with the added benefit of an experienced practitioner providing the details.
“Usually things start with a conversation. When I am sitting with a Managing Director, Department Head or HR Director / Manager, it’s the questions and answers that happen in the conversation that enable the gap analysis to start.” Laura highlights.
By understanding the gap between what training has been provided and what hasn’t, starting with the essential (things like Working at Heights or Health and Safety Awareness), it will enable a quick learning and development matrix to be developed.
These conversations can also highlight areas where the business may need to bring something in-house and so develop an expert within the team. For example, starting a LEAN programme within a manufacturing organisation, using a consultant combined with experienced employees who understand the operations, would then produce an internal training need for LEAN Six Sigma.
“The initial assessment doesn’t need to be a 6-month project, often people within the organisation are aware of the areas they don’t have formal training in, and the management team know the skills gaps they have. Collecting all of this together will enable you to have an overview of what your training budget needs to look like to upskill or develop your team.” Laura outlines.
Consulting with experts is key, if you don’t have experienced learning and development professionals within your organisation than outsourcing is a useful and cost-effective way to access this skillset.
A training plan doesn’t need to be intensive; it does, however, need to meet everyone’s needs.
“It’s the strategic guidance we offer people that makes a positive impact on their training plan, and with access to any training, I can put together a full package to implement within businesses that’s hassle free.”
Supporting HR departments to deliver an effective training programme is what OMS are here to do. This can be especially effective when a business doesn’t have a learning culture and needs support to develop it, or to help with the best methodologies for training to suit the operations and people within it.
Create the plan“Make sure you understand what success looks like. It could be that your goal is for Health and Safety to be improved at your site. It’s essential that you involve employees in the planning stage so they can identify their weaknesses or areas for development.” Laura states.
When you are creating your learning and development plan, the result won’t just be a list of training courses. Your plan should incorporate the staff satisfaction improvements you want to make, your desire to create talent from within your organisation, the re-skilling you need to do to keep up with legislation or market drivers and, crucially, that you see a clear return on your investment.
There are so many options for training today, you can send your team out to a place like OMS’ modern training centre in Leicestershire, or use virtual classroom training (we have that too!). Employees might want to use e-learning training solutions that they can self-manage over time without going to any classrooms! You could get a training company in to deliver bespoke training (we do that as well!!) tailored especially for your site, people and procedures/documentation.
What’s important is that you monitor the success of the training effectively. You could set up your own feedback system that the team inputs after the training courses to rate the trainer, or you have a scoring system against the abilities of the person that are improved or added to after their course.
Monitoring the effectiveness of your learning and development training is essential otherwise you won’t see the return on investment that should come with people accessing courses and extending their knowledge bank or skill set.
Let’s end with another quote from Branson: “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they want to stay.”
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