Open your wallet
Those members of the corporate training firm remained in the offices for a couple of days. They wanted to follow every lead and turn over every stone. They wanted to find out what had happened to the sales team after that apparently disastrous training and development session. And the technology company executives had no problem paying to keep them around. They wanted to find out what happened, too.
Do you want to keep your top employees after the job market opens again? Do you want all of your employees to be happy and to enjoy their work right now? Investing in training and education is an important part of helping you do just that. The average business spends about $1,060 on training and education per employee per year, according to research by ASTD.
Businesses that have the most success tend to spend between 2 and 3 percent of their total payroll cost on training, education and development. The average is in the middle, of course, right around 2.3 percent.
There are also effective ways to spend a little less, if your revenue is still down or if you opt to not invest as much in training. Turning toward local colleges and universities to design a custom program for your employees is often less expensive than sending them to open enrollment courses, as are distance learning and online courses. Some businesses opt to look within for employees who are experts in a specific area and can train the rest of the staff.
“One of the classic examples would be mentorship programs,” Squires says. “They are low-cost in terms of additional salary and paying for the program — but there is a cost, because they’ll only work if they’re well-designed. There’s a cost in productivity and investment. Unless you have the right ability and people who are invested in the process, it’s a way to actually go backward by trying to save money.”
