With the explosion in educational content on the web, you often read about how employees can learn on their own, watching videos and reading articles. To the extent that you are looking for basic knowledge (STEM) and general skills (e.g. using popular software products), this is true. But when it comes to specific strategy, processes and products of a particular company, the only way to train your people is to do it yourself (or hire someone to do it for you)!
If you are a small or medium-sized business (SMB) and have been hesitating on whether or not to invest in an employee training program, here are some reasons to move forward:
- It results in better performance. Sharing knowledge and best practices from your leaders, top sales reps, and customer service stars will improve your bottom line.
- It demonstrates to your employees that you are willing to invest in their development. This is especially important to millennials who will soon be the majority of the workforce.
- No more death by PowerPoint! With today’s new digital tools, subject matter experts can quickly make videos, write articles and search the web to quickly deliver quality training.
- It’s an opportunity for everyone to collaborate. You no longer need to be the “training expert” to build, review and share content with others in the organizations.
- By allowing everyone to participate in building the employee training, you free up your training experts so they can focus on highly specialized needs, like formal certifications or compliance.
- Digital training allows content to be quickly searched. Employees know how to search so why not provide answers on their phone when they need help on the job?
- You can get a head start with new recruits. Instead of waiting until they start the job, you can make employee training available as soon as they accept the position.
- It doesn’t cost a lot! With a simple tool to organize and assemble content that you build — videos, audio, text — you can curate or create training at a fraction of what it used to cost.
- It provides employees with reinforcement after your face-to-face training. No one wants to go back and read a bunch of slides, he or she prefers watching videos and reading articles.
- It improves your brand reputation. Well trained employees deliver better customer service, which boosts customer acquisition and lowers customer churn.
In the past, online training software was expensive, complicated and hard to use. The return on investment wasn’t always clear. The good news is that it isn’t this way anymore. You can achieve all of the above benefits quickly and cost-effectively with the right software.
For SMBs, employee training programs help you across the board. From employee recruiting and retention to increasing sales and improving customer service, the result is tangible. Employees expect their work experience to be same as their home experience. They are used to using Google, YouTube, social media and collaborating with friends. If you enable them to collaborate with fellow employees, they will happily share their work experiences.
As you can see from the reasons above if you focus on giving your employees more professional development opportunities the impact will be very positive.
