Q. I am in the nursery business and I continue to experience hiring incompetent or troublesome employees. What can I do to improve the quality of my workforce?
A. On the whole, most small businesses do a poor job of training employees and it’s costing them far more that they realize. It could well be that this is a contributing factor to your problem.
People advance lots of reasons as to why training isn’t really worth the effort:
• "We can’t waste time and money in a small company like this trying to educate people. That’s their responsibility".
• "I don’t run a high-tech business. All I need is honest, hard-working people who can be nice to the customers, handle the assignment the way I’ve told them to do it."
• "I’m the owner of the business and am overworked to begin with, the last new job in the world I want is to be a teacher".
Too many business owners kid themselves that well-trained employees can be had without effort. Some hope workers will turn up at the company doorstep already trained by some former employer. Others simply use the sink-or-swim method by throwing untrained workers into skilled occupations in the vain hope that they will learn on the job.
The cost of both of these misplaced judgements can be significant. Some businesses go through a seemingly endless cycle of hiring and firing, of hope and disappointment, in the search for the perfect employee that someone else has trained. Even after a long period of this practice, some haven’t learned that a good employee is made, not born.
The blunt truth is that no business, however small and unassuming it may consider itself, can afford not to train.
Management Advisor Marketing Advisor Business Communications
JWB Interest, LLC 2012 All Rights Reserved
Employee training and development is the key to building highly productive workforce. Today’s organizations must invest in developing their people if they want to stay competitive.
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