Training and Your Employee Retention Rate

If your employee retention rate is low, your training is probably to blame.

Your employee retention rate is directly affected by your training. Why is that? Well, according to a study done by the ASTD in 2003, 41% of employees at companies with poor training planned on leaving within a year vs. 12% planned departures at companies with excellent training.

But why does employee training have such a profound effect on retention rates? Well, poor training leaves an employee with insufficient knowledge and skills to do the job. He feels insecure and confused. Management hits him for his incompetence. He'll either figure it out as he goes or he won't, and he'll quit.

This is especially true with traditionally high-turnover jobs such as sales and customer service. Poor employee training in these areas will drive your human error and turnover costs out the roof.

This has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt. How much money do unskilled salespeople and customer service representatives cost you? You have to pay them for their time and then you suffer from their mistakes--lost sales, wasted opportunities, unnecessary escalations, lost customers and so on.

Just having "employee training" isn't enough. You need to have employee training that works, and unfortunately most training methods don't work.

This statement may seem arrogant, but it's true. We have worked with small businesses that have one person frantically trying to put together training programs and global corporations with a whole team of training researchers and coaches, and the problem has always been the same:their training falls short of all expectations. Quite frankly, it doesn't work.

What does that mean, though? The methods "don't work." It's very simple. They are slow, they don't teach all the necessary information, they don't result in 100% proficiency and they aren't well accepted by the staff. What they do result in is a workforce that is confused and unstable, that needs a lot of on-the-job training and that makes a lot of errors...factors that waste significant sums of money.

The actual cost of poor or no employee training--the cost of incompetence, inefficiency and human error--is staggering.

You aren't alone in your training and employee retention woes. To be honest, the employee training industry is chock full of expensive, unworkable "solutions" that produce little to no ROI.

We are different. I know, everyone says that, but listen to this. We didn't just dream up a new training method. We looked at every method we could find, scrapped the obviously unworkable parts and began testing the rest. We did this for two years and we identified the key training elements that work. We use only those elements when building our training programs and, what do you know, our programs work!

And best of all, they're brutally simple. Ingenious, but simple. Einstein once said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." This is very relevant to employee training. We found that one of the most important aspects of workable training programs was the ability to make the complex simple and understandable. We have become experts at this and have an array of training tools that we use to accomplish it. One of the most effective tools is drilling.

Don't take my word for it though. I want to show you, in detail, our training method and if its workability, and dare I say ingenuity, isn't immediately obvious to you, then that's my loss.

Enter your name and email address above and we will e-mail you our free eBook on employee training. This eBook will show you exactly why our unbelievable training system is changing the face of employee training and we will give you tools that you can immediately use to increase your productivity and reduce your turnover.