Training teams often struggle to demonstrate the ROI of training operations. Part of that is a lack of good reporting and business intelligence capabilities in existing training software, certainly. But another part is that training teams are often held back from addressing high-impact business problems where they could make a real difference. The current employee retention crisis is one of those issues.
The cost of replacing a skilled worker can amount to three to four times their salary when considering soft factors and opportunity costs. If the cost of replacing employees is so high, one would think that managers would be doing everything possible to retain them – and yet employee retention, across the whole economy, has never been lower. Younger workers, in particular, are leaving their jobs and changing employers much faster than prior generations.
The result of this broad generational climb in turnover rates and drop in retention is that businesses are losing more money than ever just trying to keep their operations staffed. If training can provide a solution to this retention problem, that would be a powerful way to boost the ROI of training operations.
Luckily, better training management practices can do just that. In this blog, we’ll discuss how a training management system can help support increased training volumes, and why those increased training volumes are the key to boosting employee retention.
Why Are Businesses Struggling to Retain and Engage Employees?
For employees to stay at a job long-term, they need to feel that staying at the business is a better prospect for them than switching . That sounds simple enough, but of course, it’s difficult to achieve in the current job market.
Job-switching has become much more popular precisely because employees tend to be able to get a better deal out of it. In recent years, job-switching employees have been able to substantially raise their salaries, rather than being punished for a complex employment history.
And if job-seekers can get a better deal for themselves by leaving your company behind, what are you offering to get them to stay?
Of course, higher salaries aren’t the only reason that employees switch jobs. Especially among younger workers, there’s an increasing trend of employees who are disengaged at their jobs. Employees want to feel that their careers are making them better people, not just that they’re engaged in a transactional work-for-money deal. But – if we’re honest with ourselves – in a lot of industries, that kind of fulfilling work is difficult to provide to employees. If you’re not in an industry where passion comes with the territory, like education, then some employees will need to be coached into being passionate about their work – and that means giving them reasons to be passionate.
These two factors – a lack of fulfilling work and the ability to increase salaries by job-switching – are key contributors to high turnover and low retention. So what can training, and better training management, do to help?
The Training Solution to Engagement and Retention
Retaining and engaging employees in a competitive environment requires offering a stronger and more meaningful incentive to stay. That’s where training, especially personalized training, comes in.
Demonstrating a long-term commitment to employees’ skill development and the future of their careers is a big investment – but so is constantly acquiring new skilled talent. Instead of churning through employees at an alarming rate, like so many businesses today do, why not take the time to invest in their personal success, and ensure them that they have a future with your business if they’ll stay and partner with the L&D team to develop their skills in the long-term.
A good training program, that provides employee training tailored to individual needs, can help employees make the mindset shift from treating your business as a stepping stone on the way to the future to thinking of your business more as a partnership that’s developing their career right now.
And of course, making employees feel like the business is investing in their future, is an excellent way to get employees engaged. A worker who feels that they’re in a dead-end job with no prospects for their future will quickly check out and start looking for a better opportunity. Demonstrating a commitment to their skills and working with them to advance their career within the organization is a great way to prevent that.
Ultimately, workers crave learning and development opportunities as a way to advance themselves in the professional world. Providing as much L&D to them as possible will pay dividends.
Keeping Up With Increased Volume With A Training Management System
But let’s say you get the buy-in from all stakeholders to push towards a culture of learning in your organization, and commit to building employees’ skills long-term. You identify the needs of the workforce at your company, get courses and learning paths charted out and content created for them, and you start laying out the groundwork to provide this training. Importantly, you also focus on personalizing content as much as possible, and crafting learning paths and course series’ that are tailored to individual learners’ needs.
Naturally, if you’re successful, you’re going to start seeing a much higher volume of learners and events. But if your training team is like most teams, this is where you’ll run into serious problems.
Trying to scale up training operations to deliver more L&D to the business will quickly become impossible if you aren’t using your staff’s time efficiently. And especially if you’re trying to personalize the learning experience, you’ll quickly find your time completely swallowed up.
Most teams lack the kind of automated and repeatable processes that would allow them to keep up. If you’re manually sending mass emails, enrolling learners, scheduling individual sessions, etc, then every expansion to your team’s operations requires more manual work. Quickly, you’ll need more staff, and if you can’t get them, the staff you have won’t have time to do anything but basic administrative tasks.
That’s not really the training team’s fault – that’s a shortcoming of training software that’s disconnected and lacks functionality that other teams in the business, like Marketing, have enjoyed for a decade or more.
A training management system is the software solution to the shortcomings of off-the-shelf, point-solution training software. A TMS combines the functionality of an LMS, an LXP, CRM, scheduling tools, resource management tools, and more, all into a single software interface. Best of all, a good training management system is built to be integrated with other software, meaning that anything it can’t do, it can seamlessly interface with other software to push and pull data.
But Really, What Can A TMS Do?
A TMS like Administrate can provide a platform approach to training management. By simplifying and centralizing the functions that go into running training operations, a TMS saves your team time and money.
With all your training data accessible from a single place, a TMS can serve as a powerful data model that allows you to automate functions like communications, reporting, scheduling, and document management.
With all the functionality of half a dozen other software systems, a TMS can administer complex, personalized, 100% reportable learning experience, all from within a single interface.
If you’re interested in training management systems, and want to know more, check out our Administrate Training Solutions page, and learn what our TMS could do for you.
