Small to medium-sized businesses face innumerable challenges. Every dollar matters, and there’s a delicate balance that must be struck. That balance is far more precarious for smaller firms than it is for large multinationals.
Unfortunately, one of the easiest things to forego when you’re trying to find money for development or marketing is training. It seems like such a small thing. Your employees should be able to learn what they need to know on the job, right? Learning as they go by way of practical, hands-on experience.
It’s true that some people excel at learning in that fashion, but the reality is that there are distinct learning styles, and different people just naturally gravitate to different learning styles. It would be a shame to hobble your best employees simply because you’re not giving them the skills they need in the format they can best learn those skills in. That’s the main reason that training is so important.
Opportunity Costs
What it comes down to really is opportunity cost. These costs can express themselves in a variety of different ways such as the straightforward loss of productivity when comparing a trained versus an untrained employee, but you can see it manifest in other ways as well, including a higher incidence of errors, which requires that more time be spent on QA/QC and rework and more customer complaints derived from the fact that your employees aren’t as up to speed as they could be.
All of these things create a current that runs against your company and can make it harder for you to push profits higher. QA/QC can be expensive and time consuming, causing product launches to be delayed and leading to a whole host of other problems.
Perhaps the most vexing issue is the increasing number of customer service complaints. This can be incredibly damaging to your business. Not only do increased complaints lead directly to an increase in customer dissatisfaction, but that dissatisfaction can lead to negative reviews online which creates a PR nightmare that you then have to pay someone to handle.
Worse, all the PR folks are doing is putting a Band-Aid on the problem. Since the employee (or employees) in question still aren’t trained, the problem will only crop up again. You’re not really fixing anything, you’re just creating more work for yourself.
Worst of all, negative reviews can lead to an outright loss of business. Nobody likes losing a sale, least of all losing one because of a problem that is entirely fixable. There are a great many pressures on you as a small to medium-sized business owner. There seems to be little point in adding more pressures when you don’t need to.
The bottom line is that training is critical. A well-trained workforce is happier, more focused and more productive. All of those things help contribute to your bottom line. Conversely, the absence of those things drag your bottom line down, causing you to essentially work against yourself. It’s hard to succeed at any enterprise or endeavor when you’re working against yourself. It’s just bad business.
