Years ago I worked for a company that employed quite a few young people as their technicians.
We had quite a high staff turnover, so I asked the staff why they thought this was the case.
They told me that initially they were really happy – our induction process was great and we trained them really well in the basics of the job – and they enjoyed their work.
But that was where it stopped. After that, there was no career development, no ongoing training (that wasn’t strictly necessary for them to do their job), and no opportunities for career progression.
So after a while, they felt stagnant, got frustrated, and began looking at the greener grass on the other side of the fence!
When I suggested to the boss that we should build in some personal development training, he was completely against the idea. He told me that high turnover in our industry was normal and that if we offered them extra training, the staff would find it even easier to leave and get better jobs with our competitors, and we would have wasted the time and the money that we had spent on them.
I managed to persuade him to change by arguing that the staff were leaving anyway, which meant we were already losing our induction and basic training costs!
I went on to say that having better trained, more efficient, happier staff, surely meant that they were likely to be more committed and do even better work for our customers – which is where the money really comes from.
Staff retention did improve, but what was even more important was that our customers loved the fact that our happy team was always so well trained, so business boomed too! Job done!
