Give some additional power to your people

Give some additional power to your people

According to the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, companies with a high level of training are likely to grow at a faster rate and achieve above-average profitability. The body found that increasing the proportion of employees trained by five per cent is linked to a four per cent increase in productivity.

Rachel Clacher, co-founder of outsourced reception company Moneypenny, is a firm believer in the power of staff training. ‘It has played a fundamental part in our growth, and our staff turnover is negligible as a result of the programmes we’ve put in place,’ she says.

‘When we were a small company, we were doing a lot of our training on a one-to-one basis as we went along. But when we started to grow, we needed to formalise that into a training scheme.’

For Thomas Vollrath, CEO of hosting company Webfusion, implementing training schemes was imperative for the future success of his company when it relocated from Nottingham to London.

‘At that time we had a staff turnover of 100 per cent, so moving had a profound upheaval on our business. When we first started out in London we also had very low service rates, with only 29 per cent of enquiries being resolved. Once we hired more people, we decided to address the symptoms of the service problem,’ he says.

Quality control
Not only did Vollrath create a training department and introduce structured courses, but he has also put 35 staff members through NVQ programmes. Now the company’s service level is 92 per cent and its staff turnover levels are the lowest in more than two years, notes Vollrath.

‘There were pragmatic reasons for putting our staff through NVQ programmes because we got funding, but there are still big time commitments involved,’ he says.

Nevertheless, Vollrath says the advantages far outweigh any expense – that’s why he decided to increase the number of staff taking NVQs this year despite the recession.

‘Of course they are skills you can pick up on the job, but having them demonstrated by an expert can be very powerful and has a huge effect on people’s understanding of best practice,’ he says.