Effectiveness of Employee Training and Development
How a company chooses to enforce employee responsibilities and handle client relationships can have a great impact on overall company performance. If employees are confused about what is expected of them, it can pose harm to client relationships. Clients can choose to take their business elsewhere if they feel that the services rendered are not up to their standards or not what the company promised. Some companies choose to prevent, or stop, this from happening by implementing employee training and development programs that will provide their employees with professional structure and a complete understanding of their duties. This initiative in turn will positively affect the company’s long-term goals and highlight their employees’ talents and contributions.
For the consultative firm that Herbers (2013) referenced, they built a training program that separated those that had professional and nonprofessional duties. Those with nonprofessional duties were put on a career path to eventually become managers, supervisors, and executives while those with professional duties were left to the most important tasks, advising. This unique approach consisted of a centralized client service and operations department that allowed junior advisors to complete a six-week orientation period to completely concentrate on their number one priority, properly advising clients. The motive behind this original department is to make sure that secretarial and essential office functions are not being handled by young, impressionable advisors. They concluded that because they are neither taught nor driven to perform such tasks, they did them poorly. This method instantly highlighted the problem of the advisor turnover rate.
The key to structuring a client service center, according to Herbers (2013), is to have at least one person providing dedicated support and directing training. It is equally important to include in the training, not only what an employee’s job requires, but about the company’s goals as a whole. Along with making sure that the company’s goals are clear, the training should also include how the company wishes to provide their clients with superior services. Those that are a part of the training enjoy secretarial and essential office tasks so that immediately lowers employee turnover. The CSS training is also six-weeks and is hugely built around the company operations manual. In short, the training highlights general understanding of company procedures and various software used, understanding the standards to which dealing with clients will be held, grasping how to process new clients, and demonstrating the role of satisfying continuing client capabilities (Herbers, 2013). This approach to providing employee training satisfies the consultative firm’s needs while also catering to the development of their employees’ professional potential. The firm’s needs are met because their advisors can focus solely on one thing, client advising while the client services specialists are being trained to incorporate their duties into the overall purposes and practices of the firm itself.
Initiating a training program that teaches each department their duties and responsibilities yet ties the overall objectives of the company into each, respective training session allows for each department to have a better understanding of what each does and how each one serves to enhance the long-term goals of the organization. By supplying this type of understanding through training, the opportunity arises to allow employees in respective departments to come together cohesively. This has proved as a good start for a fine arts storage and transportation company that has reformed their employee training program to become more effective for their long-term company objectives.
Accompanied with substantial training and position development, employee retention and confidence can increase. According to Bushman (2013), going