Training cost is investment, brings returns surely
If you are planning to slash training costs to the bone as part of cost cutting measures to survive the recession just think over. True recession survivors follow a different philosophy altogether.
In order to face tough times, they believe their people should be adequately prepared. Far from cutting down training expenses they actually place a renewed emphasis on training during recession.
They tend to look beyond conventional cost cutting measures and set sights on ample opportunities provided by recession to leapfrog competition.
Their survival logic is quite simple; if you want your people to perform better than the competition, you must show them how to do it. And there is no better means to do so than through effective training.
Recession or not, you need a loyal customer base to thrive in your field of operations.
Customer satisfaction is always the key to business success. But most companies lose focus on this very vital factor and tend to concentrate only on cost cutting measures to beat the recession.
To maintain customer satisfaction levels you must appreciate the relation between employee training, efficiency and quality of goods and services produced.
As part of cost saving initiatives when skilled employees are laid off or training costs for existing employees are drastically cut down it will undoubtedly have a negative impact on the cost and quality of goods and services produced.
Inadequately trained people not only produce goods that are low on quality but also high on costs due to rise in scrap and rework.
Poor quality of services puts off the customers and they tend to drift away. On the contrary if you continue to invest in honing the skills of your people you will be able to produce superior quality of services.
This will help you to fare much better than your rivals. Better quality helps you to keep your existing customers satisfied and also enables you to attract new ones.
Success in recession depends to a great extent on your ability to cash in on your rivals’ failure.
There is nothing like it if you are able to make your rivals’ customers crossover to you while keeping your own customer base intact.
Prudent companies do not view training costs as a drain on revenue but regard them as tools that help in generating business. They use the down time resulting from recession to build employee skills.
During slowdown the workload on your employees gets reduced due to fall in overall volume of sales. This will make your best employees feel bored and also insecure. They may even be tempted to look for better opportunities elsewhere. Instead of making these employees sit idle give them an opportunity to upgrade their skills.
Training is no doubt expensive but the benefits often exceed the costs. They help you to retain your best employees by giving a boost to their sagging morale.
When the economy brightens your people will be able to handle work in a more proficient manner and bring cost savings to you in the long run.
Providing training during recession is not as expensive as it is otherwise.
The training providers find very few takers so you can expect some good deals to come by.
But be wary of too low prices. If the quality of training is poor it practically serves no purpose. The best alternative would be to use internal experts to provide the necessary training. Let your senior executives share their experiences and knowledge with the staff. As all the employees benefit from their knowledge and skills it leads to both training and team building.
It also results in cost savings, as you are not paying any outside trainers.
Cost savings are no doubt crucial during a recession but training is obviously not the right area to economise.
In fact without training people will not be able to work efficiently and they end up adding to costs rather than reducing them.
Only a well-trained employee who is capable of looking at the organisation’s overall performance can come up with financial savings at the micro level.
N. PURNIMA SRIKRISHNA
faqs@cnkonline.com
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