TRAINING AND TURNOVER

Over the years of dealing with turnover and creating and conducting training workshops one thing has become very clear to me and led me to establish the following statement and policy in our company,

"It is better to train your people and have them leave than to not train them and have them stay".

Think about that for a moment. You can develop a company training program that EVERYONE goes through and will they ALL leave, absolutely not. Sure, a few may leave you and go on to bigger and better things, maybe even to a competitor. But isn't part of our responsibility to help our employees improve themselves in life?

Let me give you an example. Several years ago I developed a 15 hour supervisory training class for our company. We conducted the class in five three hour sessions and when the attendees had satisfactorily completed the course they were presented with a very nice framed completion certificate and an increase in pay. They became valuable additions to our organization.

Once in a while, one of our graduates would take their certificate and apply for a position with one of the large in house operations in town. We had several large manufacturing plants that paid excellent wages and some of our supervisors applyed for and secured very well paying supervisory positions with those companies.

While it was disappointing to lose them, how could I argue with the opportunity for them to more than double their wages? We did our training job so well that a couple of the large in house companies told me that if someone walked in with our completion certificate, they were automatically hired. While some of our management staff complained about that, I took it as a compliment. Yes, we lost some great people but they raised their standard of living.

Let's not forget the overall effectiveness of the program. For every one of the people we lost we had a substanial number that stayed and benefited our company tremendously.

Let me also mention that as large one time cleaning projects became available at those large manufacturing plants, our company was the one they called to do the work. In reality, it was a win win situation for everyone. The people we trained benefited, the company they went to work for benefited, and we benefited with very profitable, high volume special project work.

Now let's look at the other side of the equation of not training them and having them stay. What are the risks? Let's see, maybe they don't learn how to handle discipline issues, on the job accidents, unemployment claims, technical information, training the staff, and the list goes on and on. You see, they stay but we run a less than quality organization and the reality is that the good people leave and we are left with the untrained, difficult to handle, account losing employees.

So let me say again, "it is better to train your employees and have them leave than to not train them and have them stay". The benefits of a well trained staff far outweigh the loss of some employees that you helped better their station in life. The alternative is everyone gets NO training and stays. Your employee turnove rate is great but I will venture to stay your account turnover is horrendous and afterall, the accounts pay the bill. If you don't have an organized training program for all levels of your company, let me encourage you to start developing one TODAY.  It will be worth every dime you invest.

By the way, another of my favorite sayings is "If you want to enjoy firing someone, take them to lunch and buy theirs to go". That will be a subject for another time.

Till next time.