The Secret to Decreasing Recruitment Costs? Training.

Employees are a company’s biggest asset and investing in employees is vital to business growth. You’ve probably heard phrases like, ‘a company is only as good as its staff’, or ‘winning the marketplace, starts with winning the workplace’. These both suggest that success starts within your organisation and, more specifically, your employees. Richard Branson (Founder of the Virgin Group), once said ‘Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients’, and I think it’s safe to say he’s done pretty well for himself!

The reason the recruiting process is long and costly is so that you get the right talent in to your organisation, but the emphasis on the employee and their journey should not stop there. For as long as they are within your organisation, that individual journey continues with you. You should do what you can to help them develop, progress and thrive, in order to add to both the success of the individual and the company.

The Stats

Training is vital to any organisation. It presents the perfect opportunity for employees to grow their knowledge and improve the skills required to do their job, making them much more effective in the workplace. Despite training coming at a cost for the employer (whether time or financial), the return on investment can be huge if done correctly.

Around 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their personal career development. This is massive, given both the cost an organisation must invest in recruitment and the importance of keeping hold of talent. Everyone knows that replacing staff can cost far more than retaining existing staff.

A report from Gallup in the US revealed that 38% of the workforce is powered by millennials, and by 2025 it’s estimated to be at 75%. This is a worrying stat for employers, given that the turnover amongst millennials is very high. Reports show that only 50% of millennials plan to be with the same company in 12 months time! Gallup also estimated that the cost of replacing an employee can be 150% of that original employee’s annual salary, or even more.

Reports also show that a lack of workplace engagement and training result in a turnover cost of $30.5 billion a year in the US alone.

Building Skills

Staff retention, although a big factor, is just the tip of the iceberg. As an individual, employees feel far more valued when their organisation shows the time and effort to develop them further through training. This feeling of being valued can have a massive ripple effect, improving morale, job satisfaction, staff retention, work rate, teamwork, confidence and much more.

These elements are also not even factoring in the most obvious benefit of the training: the increase in knowledge and skills.

Through increasing the knowledge and skill sets of its employees, an organisation can maximise efficiency through having a workforce that can do more and produce more in less time (thus also reducing the need of additional recruitment). This will also:

• Limit the risk of error (thus reducing expenses, waste and ensuring you maintain a good reputation).
• Spot and develop individual employee skill sets in order to nurture and promote staff internally.
• Prepare individuals for extra responsibilities.
• Identify any weaknesses either with the workplace or employees that you can then develop and work on.
• Make your employees more adaptable. Several studies have confirmed that there is a link between the amount of time an employee spends in training and the speed with which they can pick up different ideas and methods.

Has COVID-19 Changed This?

The pandemic has proven that training is more important than ever. Organisations around the world have needed to re-train and upskill their employees to ensure that they can continue to carry out their usual business functions. LinkedIn’s annual learning and development report show that, for a third year in a row, over a third of organisations (37%) are looking to greatly increase their budgets and expenditure in regards to learning and development, including that of their staff.

Whether this is the ‘new norm’, or simply a contingency plan/interim method of working to ensure that businesses can continue to function/trade, the benefits are clear. Ensuring that employees are having regular training can improve a workplace’s adaptability, something that is becoming ever more important in a constantly developing, technology-lead world. It’s important to remember how important adaptability is in the workplace.

The global pandemic is not the cause of this requirement; it has simply highlighted the need.

If you are interested in further training your employees in Zoho products, contact us to see what additional training we can offer you.