Training your team and having them leave your business soon after is a frustrating expense, but not training them is a risk you can’t afford to take if you want to hold on to your best people and attract and retain new talent that will help you grow.
Why should training your teams be part of your retention strategy?
- It takes time to build institutional knowledge – and time to build relationships. Training and opportunities for improvement build loyalty among staff, so your business will benefit from having loyal, upskilled team members who know your business, and who know your clients too.
- Relationships are not just between your people and your clients – the employer-employee relationship is vital too. Training – whether it’s basic onboarding and effective internal communications, or NQF-level programmes – tells your people you respect them, you believe in them, and you want them to grow with you. What else grows? Their loyalty to your business.
- Find out what people want to learn and how they want to grow, rather than choosing a path for them – they’ll appreciate your investment and will reward it with growth in your business.
My focus while building The Capital Hotels and Apartments over the last 10 years has always been training and empowering my teams, but it has to be done strategically so that both parties’ benefit. We view training and development as a two-way relationship, though, with investment from both sides.
What does this mean?
- We offer world-class training programmes
- We encourage our people to identify the roles they would like to grow into, and the responsibilities they would like to adopt. They’re then tasked with finding someone already in that position, and to spend free time job shadowing to be sure they’re confident of the growth path they’ve chosen.
- Once they’ve got this insight, and they’ve researched how they’re going to complete their growth journey, they approach us for support in training.
People that are prepared to invest their own time in this way demonstrates that they’ve got what it takes to go places – with us – and we’re happy to invest in their training and development.
The success of this approach is evident in the low attrition we’ve seen among people who have grown through the ranks within the company. The company has benefited too, because our teams are more skilled, and they know our business and our clients so well that they’re less likely to make mistakes along the way.
It’s a win for everyone involved.
