Remember: it’s better to train an employee that ends up leaving than not training the ones that stay. A good training program is not out of an SME to reach.
Providing training in an SME
This is the third post of the series HR and Small Business and follows the post about Performance Appraisal Methods. In that post, we highlighted that aside from having a committed team with good skills, it was mandatory having a good evaluation system to keep employees motivated and in line with the business goals.
Forgetting the importance of a training program generates a loss of competitiveness, efficiency, and effectiveness. This might lead to losing valuable team members and therefore customers, market and eventually our company.
That’s why it is so important to keep the team updated. This is always difficult in an SME, so we have to look for innovative ways to achieve this without spending too much time or money.
Self-driven employees
In an SME, each person fulfills several roles. In order to have a good training program, you need self-driven employees. Those are the ones that will propose new areas of professional growth.
For this to happen it is essential to have an “open door” policy for all training proposals and initiatives. You should always support the ones that align with the business objectives.
Always give an agile response, and for that, you need an automated system. Nothing discourages an employee more than feeling that his initiatives fall on deaf ears.
How to afford a good training program
The issue of costs is always relevant to an SME, but it shouldn’t stop you. Some suggestions to make training programs possible are:
- Form a group of employees who share an interest in the same training program. You can set special schedules that won’t affect your working hours and employees can share resources (manuals, books, tutorials). In an SME the amount of people is never very big, so it’s important to provide training programs that all can join.
- Share existing knowledge within the company. A lot of times, the necessary knowledge is already available, so you won’t need to pay for courses. You could organize a meeting (or even a working breakfast) with colleagues to exchange knowledge.
- Prioritize and plan. You should schedule all training programs.
All these elements, as well as facilitating the training, help greatly to retaining talents of SMEs. That’s a great advantage since the best professionals are the ones that will continually look for exciting opportunities.
Using BPM to improve the training process
Flokzu will improve the process of receiving training proposals, monitoring, planning and executing them.
Automating this process ensures the completion of all training programs. Anyone can suggest a training program. And it can be shared with the whole company to see who else would be interested.
For example, you could design a training process with the following steps:
Steps:
- Any team member can initiate a “Training proposal”.
- Task “Evaluate training proposal”, in which the head of HR analyzes the different alternatives (online course, business breakfast to share knowledge, etc.). He also considers costs and alignment with the business objectives. Two things can happen:
– if the manager rejects the training program, the reasons are notified to the applicant and the process comes to an end
– if the manager approves the training program, the process continues to step 3. - Task “Publish training and gather interested employees”: the training program is published and all interested can join in. After 10 days, it automatically goes on to the next step.
- Task “Train employees”, completed by the supervisor.
- The training program is evaluated (Task “Evaluate training results”) based on predetermined objectives.
- Task “Evaluate training results 6 months later”, where the supervisor evaluates the results.
- Task “Communicate results to employees”, so they know what results were obtained, etc.
