How Can You Evaluate the Influence of Staff Training on Company Innovations?
Let’s have a look at the company and the staff, and find an answer to a simple question: What is the efficiency of the company?
The efficiency of a business is the result, which can be either growth of profits or cost reduction.
If you want to evaluate the efficiency, you need to measure everything you do, measure and evaluate the influence on the growth of the company. This is how you answer the simple question: what have some actions given to the company?
It is important to measure the result, not the activity. Result generates the positive cash flow, while activity only shows the appearance of work.
I will give you some a simple example: reports, studies, statistics, number of phone calls – this is all activity, but not the result. You need the result! And factors that affect the result!
One of the key tasks of a Human Resources department is to organize trainings. It is simple at first glance: you ran a seminar, spent 8 hours of working time. What’s next?
- What did this training give to your company?
- To your employees?
- What result did you get?
- How does this result influence the company growth and realization of the strategy?
These questions are very important, because they give you an opportunity to decide whether you are moving in the right direction, or not.
Everything affects the result, maybe from a positive side, maybe from a negative. When we train our staff to be innovative, we need:
- Track which skills from the training they started to use,
- Track the correlation between the obtained skills and classical business indicators, like revenue, costs, customer’s loyalty, quality.
If you cannot evaluate the influence of training or some other action on the result, then you need to change the process. Everything we measure should affect the result. This is the approach of innovative companies. This approach gives you an opportunity to concentrate on the result: processes and actions that lead to result.
The task of an HR department is to tell this approach to each and every employee, running the continuous explanatory work.
Staff trainings, continuous explanatory work, inspiration and enthusiasm are the features of innovative companies. Innovations are linked with growth and development of the company. The company faces new projects during its development, hence it is forced to review internal business processes and increase the headcount. It often happens that reorganization and headcount increase go at the same time. When a new employee joins the company, competitiveness and innovations of your company are under a small treat or a test, if you like.
Why? Because a newcomer gets into an unknown to him corporate environment, and the problem of his adaptation is extremely important. If adaptation doesn’t get enough attention, then the newcomer will start acting on a whim, without a proper understanding of corporate strategy of the company.
Let’s review the key approaches that you need to apply to keep innovations and competitiveness of the company when you hire a new employee:
- The person should work the right way straight away. You need to train him for this.
- Ensure that the person understands the corporate culture of the company, knows the key information about the business-processes of the company, about the company products, major customers and competitors.
Training should contain the following points:
- What is the company strategy
- How do the main business-processes work
- What is good and what is bad in the company
- Who are the major customers of the company
- Who are the major competitors of the company
- What are the strong sides of the company
- Who the employee is in the organisational structure of the company
- What are the employee’s tasks for the next three months.
Such an adaptation should be centralised. You should not leave employee alone while he trains and studies this new information. A colleague-mentor, who explains the key questions, would be the best way to efficiently train the newcomer and to integrate him in the team.
The following questions allow you to evaluate the level of training in your company:
- How does training influence the achievement of strategic goals of your company?
- Do you have staff training plans for all the company for a half-year, a year?
- Have you determined which skills need improvements in order to achieve the goals of company strategy?
Select the trainings, which develop the skills that help the achievement of the goals of company strategy. Staff training is very important, because it lets you to keep and educate the right people.
- Who should run trainings?
- Who should initiate training, including the managers’ training?
HR department should deal with trainings in all the aspects. Through training, efficient training, you determine the future of the company and employees. Defining the future, we give certainty and confidence, increase loyalty. All this allow us to keep the necessary employees, ensure the growth and development of the company according to the pre-set corporate strategy.
