Investing in the Future

Leverage Existing Resources and Training for Employee Development

The world we live in today is radically different than where we were not only 50, or 20, but even 5 years ago. As Bob Dylan said, the times, they are a-changin’. Truly, only a decade ago the first smartphone was released into the world. Can you imagine your life without one now?

With the commoditization of distribution, anyone can launch a product to the marketplace, and options are more plentiful than ever. New technologies are increasingly becoming integral parts of our daily life. How is one to keep up with it all?

Continuing education is the key to keeping up-to-date with new technologies, best practices, and overall industry trends. Surely you’ve heard this before. Hopefully, you already engage in some form of training, but perhaps you do not have a formal program in place. A constant rebuttal to the argument for providing continuing education and training is the cost incurred to send employees to seminars and workshops–paying for not only the session itself but also travel and lodging costs. Not to mention the opportunity cost in the absence of those employees and slowed production. With the fairly high turnover rate common to the manufacturing industry, you may even wonder if training is worth the investment.

Maybe you’ve heard the old business joke:

“CFO asks CEO: What happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave us?”

CEO: What happens if we don’t, and they stay?”

Human capital is your company’s most valuable resource. It is critical to train your employees because it manages performance expectations, increases productivity and retains employees. As Richard Branson said, “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”

Productivity

Often companies keep careful track of how many candidates they’ve screened, how many made it to the full interview process, and how many were hired. These statistics are interesting, but the most important indicator of business performance is missing: how many truly productive employees have they added? Because metrics only surround the employment status of hiring and firing, the real goal of being 100% efficient is overlooked. By measuring productivity, these companies would see that much of the time spent recruiting, hiring, and integrating is going to waste. Even when they are made aware of the lack of productivity among new employees, many CEOs and managers think they don’t have time to invest in training.

Consider for a moment the scenario of enrolling members of your department in the Safety Basics online course. Let’s average three hours per student to complete the course. Say that you have ten students register—that’s 30 hours of training in total. Next year those 10 people will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If the safety training efforts result in a 1 percent decrease in employee downtime, it gains your company the equivalent of two hundred hours of productivity. All for thirty training hours.

Performance Expectations

How do you know whether or not an employee is meeting expectations? You clearly outline expectations by training them for the job. By not training your people, you set forth no foundation for performance management. By utilizing training, you ensure expectations are outlined and understood from the start. By using online training in particular, you are able to craft consistency in learning across all departments.

Retention

Recently, a team manager had one of his most productive packaging engineers, Henry, leave to pursue a managerial position with a competitor. The CEO reached out to Henry thinking he might have been unhappy, prompting him to leave. As it turned out, he was very happy at the company—he just never thought a similar opportunity existed where he was. By outlining performance goals and setting forth a training track that an employee can complete to enter the pool of candidates qualified for a promotion, you encourage them to reach their goals.

Online Learning Makes Sense

Back to the ubiquitous smartphones. They enable us to access information at rapid speed and in short bursts. Think about the last time you wanted to look something up; did you get out a textbook and skim the table of contents or did you hop on your smartphone and do a quick search?

Your last encounter with online education may have felt antiquated, but times, they are a-changin’ in this realm too. The Packaging School’s learning management system is accessible on any device and organized in micro-lessons for quick consumption. Best of all, online learning with The Packaging School provides measurable data on participant performance so you can see exactly how your team is progressing. This allows organizations to level-set employees and identify talent.

Interested in including packaging training in your continuing education endeavors?