IN an economic downturn, businesses owners become nervous and start to cut expenses - not always for any good reason but “just in case” and it seems that marketing and training budgets are often the first in line.
There are, however, good examples of businesses which, during the last recession, saw the benefit of implementing a balanced exploitation of marketing spend for long-term customer motivation, promotion for short-term sales boosts and staff training in key specialist areas to ensure the business and the valuable staff were ready to exploit the upturn as and when it arrived.
More than ever managers need to scrutinise their training performance. In the initial phase of a downturn, business will be entirely focused on survival, but after that there should be an opportunity to look ahead to the future.
Training your staff is critical to that process.
To measure your training Return on Investment (ROI) - you must consider what is the reason for the training, what is the investment and how is the return measured.
Reason for Training
To enable workers to do their jobs better and learn new skills that can be applied to the company's goals. Sometimes staff are trained to satisfy government requirements, to ensure safety or to prevent lawsuits.! Managers are often trained in people-handling skills, and everyone needs to be trained in Customer focus skills.
Investment in Training
Costs will include training material and the time spent by the trainers in the classroom.
Measuring the ROI
The greatest factor in measuring the return on investment from training is deciding what the training is to achieve. Measuring the amount of money generated by a group before and after the training and then comparing that with the cost of the training is the way to measure the ROI.
The reason to train should be to improve the company's bottom line. This can be measured by the improvement in the quality of the goods and services you provide. A measurable reduction of problems and improved quality of the end product and satisfied customers, who by word-of-mouth will become your best salesmen.
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