5 Reasons: Why Train Your Employees [Statistics Included]

Why is it Important to train employees?

This is the confession Coca-Cola Company put on its website:

“We are committed to extending education and development programs to associates at all levels of the organization. The success of The Coca-Cola Company depends on every employee in the organization. It is people who make the magic happen…”

So what makes their executives believe in corporate training?

Statistics for Training Employees:

• Untrained employees take up to 6x longer to perform the same task as trained employees.
• Companies that don’t train their employees are 3x more likely to lose them than companies that do train their staff.
• Corporate learning ROI can amount to 5,000 percent.

Still not convinced? Let’s dive deeper and see why training is so important for companies:

5 Reasons for Training Employees:

1. Increase productivity:

Companies can lose money with every mistake employees make. Call center operator didn’t follow the script with a customer? New sales rep couldn’t pass the gatekeeper? Marketing analyst doesn’t know Excel functions and wastes his time? That happens all the time. If your employees are properly trained, their personal productivity and the company’s income will increase. Improved production quality, advanced business communications, increased sales productivity, better service—all this can be achieved through staff training and development, offline and online.

2. Save company knowledge:

Are you keeping under-performers in your company only because of their “unique” knowledge? Personnel shouldn’t be the only knowledge source and carrier. If it is, the valuable information disappears from the company along with the leaving employees, or spreads being substantially garbled. Treat knowledge better and stop being a hostage of your “old-timers”: create databases, online courses with exams (on your product, on typical client objections, etc.) and video tutorials (on advanced features of your product, how to input data into CRM, etc.)

3. Align business processes:

All employees have different backgrounds. In many cases, this leads to creation of a “Frankenstein monster” instead of the product you planned. Without clearly defined and explained procedures, employees waste a lot of time on unnecessary activities. You need to guarantee that all staff members stick to the same standards (e.g. answer all emails in 24 hours) and apply the same tools and techniques. Create online courses with instructions. A lot of simple tools exist that allow making a course based on the PowerPoint presentation in 5-10 minutes.

4. Quick and quality onboarding:

The worst (but still popular) employee enrollment strategy is to leave them to sink or swim without any guidance. If you don’t train new hires, you not only risk eroding your company standards, but also establish no basis for further performance management. Develop an onboarding course sets that teach your product features, business processes, sales scripts and customer objections, FAQs. Add tests and exams to ensure the learning effectiveness. It’s especially crucial for the positions with a high turnover rate like in call centers, fast food, retail, etc.

5. Higher loyalty and less turnover:

Satisfied employees are productive employees. Training increases the wellbeing of people and reduces absenteeism, while reducing mistakes and stress in the workplace. According to Kelly Services, 57 percent of employees value learning new skills at work more than higher pay or career growth. Recruiting new staff is expensive and time-consuming. It’s much better to train and retain your people in the first place.

We estimate that in three years, 80 percent of companies will provide training for their employees, and it will mainly be online (as opposed to 15 percent as it is today). Do you improve your company’s productivity through training? Try to improve productivity with time management activities for your employees.

How to Start Training Employees:

Embracing eLearning can become the first step, as it is the cheapest (but effective) way to spread knowledge among the staff and assess the results of learning. Want to try it out now? We’re offering 9 engaging courses on HR, Time Management and Leadership for free. You’ll get certificates and can invite your colleagues as well. ELearning can be fun!

Image (left)Elena Masolova, Eduson.tv Founder and CEO. Eduson.tv is a large corporate eLearning platform represented in 20+ countries and 4 languages, educating over 100,000 employees at Coca-Cola, Heineken, Efes, Schneider Electric and other companies.