Educating your staff on technical as well as customer service, personal development, and leadership yields phenomenal returns, but most small businesses (and large companies) don’t do this very well. I mentioned the little island on the Great Barrier Reef earlier. Just a little bit of training would have
gone a long way to improve the service I received there.
At a recent hotel stay, I talked to a new bellman who was handling my luggage and asked him what kind of training he had received. He said he was walked around the hotel and shown where things are located. That’s it? The manager of that hotel is asleep at the wheel. This was a nice hotel connected
to a beautiful convention center. It doesn’t cost that much to have a few meetings like the ones mentioned here to transfer values. Obviously the values are missing at the top and therefore not shared because they don’t exist!
I say take it beyond the meetings mentioned. Send your staff to outside educational events. It may feel like a challenge to spend the money to send an employee to a class or to a seminar. Not only does the seminar cost money, you lose production, and the amazing thing is your employees want to get
paid while at the class! Ten shortly after the seminar, they quit! At this point, you’ve got to ask yourself a Zig Ziglar question: “Is it better to train them and lose them, or not train them and keep them?”
My experience has been that having my staff attend educational events outside the office generates a huge return on investment. There may be things you can train them on in-house without investing a lot of money, but don’t leave it at that.
(Reference Pages 212-213 of the 5 Secrets of a Phenomenal Business Book by Howard Partridge)
