Improving Employee Experience: Training and Development

14th February 2019

When running a successful business, how your employee feels about coming to work each day directly correlates to the customer experience.

According to statistics compiled by Blake Morgan, companies with highly engaged employees outperform their competitors by 147%, and companies that excel at customer experience have 1.5x more engaged employees than those companies that deliver poor customer experience.

This means, happy employees lead to happy customers, which then leads to a healthy revenue stream and higher profit margins.

Now there are many ways to improve the employee experience, which is how your employees perceive your business, with a positive perception being a positive employee experience.

You can offer a higher salary, provide staff benefits, or maybe you could offer a staff room with bean bags, but the most cost-effective way of improving employee experience is to provide training and development.

Let’s look at some of the positive effects of training on employee experience.

 

Save Time and Money

Training and development should be seen as an investment, not an expense. Poor company performance often happens when an employee doesn’t know what they are supposed to do on the job. With the right training and guidance, employees will be able to get a better understanding of their job role and your company’s vision.

The right training would reduce the time spent on correcting mistakes, receive fewer customer complaints (which can lead to losses if the customer demands compensation or their money back), and less supervision.

 

Less Turnover

When staff know what they are doing on the job, it generally increases self-esteem and, more importantly, it improves loyalty to the company. If you provide your workers with excellent training opportunities that can enhance their career prospects or give them a chance the improve their skills so they can do their job better, they are less likely to leave.

As you may know, high staff turnover can lead to significant costs. Whenever a staff leaves, you have to pay a number of separation costs like exit interviews, administration functions relating to the employee termination, compensation and severance pay. And let’s not forget about the cost of replacing staff. Recruitment agencies and job boards charge hefty fees, plus you also factor in the cost for new employee onboarding, conducting interviews and sifting through applications.

Believe me, this expenditure is better off being used in investing in training.

 

Enhance Your Company’s Reputation

If your company’s training program is excellent, your employees will, without any hesitation, promote your business’s working culture to their family and friends through word-of-mouth, which is the best form of advertising only because it is free, and people trust the options of their family and friends.

This would make your company more attractive to potential new recruits.

 

Routes to Implement an Effective Training Program

Thanks to recent advancement in digital technologies, there are many avenues you can take to implement a training program to bolster your employee experience. There is the traditional route of classroom-based teaching while does provide the benefit of face-to-face learning, but this can be costly to implement, and does hinder your company’s productivity.

The digital alternative is to create an online training portal that staff can access anywhere via an online connection. The benefit here is that the resources can be developed once, and can be reused over and over again, saving cost in the long term.

Alternatively, and this depends on the type of training you want, you can utilise an external training provider that delivers online distance learning. The beauty of online distance learning is that your staff have the ability to study at their own pace and in their own time. Most online distance learning providers have a portal where they contact the tutor for support and access course materials.