What happens when organisations don’t invest in staff training? 22 09 26

The first thing that happens, is that turnover accelerates, and it’s usually the good people who leave first. Better development opportunities are consistently among the top reasons employees give for leaving, and the employees most likely to leave are the ambitious ones who will have options elsewhere…such a shame, and you are left retaining the people who don’t have alternatives…the reverse of what you want!

Organisations will simply say…”they wanted a change”…not the true reason, once you scratch under the surface!
Then throw into the mix that replacement costs will be roughly 50–200% of salary depending on seniority, once you count recruiting, vacancy, and re training new recruits…do you want those costs?

Skills can soon become outdated, and a team that hasn’t learned anything new in three years isn’t standing still…it’s falling behind those competitors who have. The gap then compounds, because catching up later costs more than staying current would have! If only you had! Quality problems multiply quietly. Undertrained staff make more errors, take longer, and escalate more issues, which takes up more management time…and at a higher hourly rate!

Management then becomes the bottleneck. People promoted into supervisory roles without any training on how to manage generally manage the way they were managed…sometimes that might be ok…often its not! This is one of the most expensive gaps, because a poorly equipped manager lessens the output of everyone reporting to them.

Think staff morale, and motivation…how much is that worth! Employees interpret a training budget as a statement about whether the company sees them as an investment or a cost line. That interpretation shows up in discretionary effort long before it shows up in a resignation letter…more costs whichever!

Organisations will say that they don’t have the budget. The costs are immediate, but compare that to the costs already mentioned. Ironically, training increases retention, it saves money!
There’s also a genuine measurement problem. Turnover, error rates, and slow delivery are easy to see but hard to trace back to a training decision made two years earlier. So the cost is real but unattributed! Beware!

Its easy to defer training spend…but the deferment usually drags on indefinitely. Develop your staff, motivate your staff, and see your retention levels grow. Training will grow your bottom line! Ever thought of that!