enjamin Franklin once said, "For the best return on your money, pour your purse into your head.”
This quote perfectly shows how important it is for a business to invest in employee training and impact the minds and skills of the workforce. And yes, effective training programs serve as the cornerstone for organizational growth.
There, the right strategy can improve individual hard and soft skills, enhance employee engagement, and foster appropriate corporate culture.
What are the other benefits of training for employees and corporate organizations? Read on to explore key employee training benefits and link training to business performance.
Why Is Employee Training Crucial for Business Success?
Employee training is crucial for business success as it impacts the workforce's performance, retention, and engagement and affects business results.
In many cases, the training allows a company to respond to a change, meet a new goal, or answer the learning needs of the employees.
💡Here is what the Gallup study says about its significance: employee training improves a company’s productivity by 17% and profitability by 21% if offered to engaged employees.
Importantly, for a business, the benefits of corporate training can be direct and indirect. For instance, if providing training to a marketing or sales team, they are likely to bring new leads meaning more profits for the company in the long term.
At the same time, investment in leadership development programs can significantly add to the culture and creation of a sustainable system, not to mention the participation and involvement of the employees.
- Effect on the organization. Establishes culture, changes behavior, supports leadership, brings initiatives.
- Effect on the workforce. Answers learning needs, adds to engagement, allows collaboration, and improves retention.
As a result, employee training programs affect both the organization or business and the workforce, affecting employees' behavior, corporate culture, and decision-making.
What Strategic Benefits Does Training Offer?
Aligning business needs and goals with corporate training programs can give significant benefits to the organization. Companies may plan which essential skills the workforce would need and how to offer training to them effectively.
With such an approach, they can prepare themselves for upcoming events, whether it is a product launch, entrance into a new market, or internal changes.
Next, we will cover in detail the main benefits of training, from increased performance and retention to organizational flexibility and leadership development:
#1. Increased employee performance
In most cases, employee training suggests getting the necessary skills and knowledge that allow for improving work process, quality, and productivity.
There, the value of training lies in the expertise that a person gets to grow as a professional, perform job duties, and excel at what they do.
💡Subject to SurveyMonkey research, employees underline that corporate training contributes to their overall job performance(59%) and helps with time management skills (41%).
What are great examples of posttraining effects in this regard?
💡The research by the American Society for Training & Development provides that, out of two corporate groups, the one that got 3 times more training achieved a 57% increase in sales and a 37% rise in gross profit per employee.
Overall, corporate training becomes a gateway to unlocking potential, learning new methods, and reaching peak performance.
#2. Boosts employee retention
Another part of corporate training benefits refers to employee retention. Investing in corporate training means answering the professional and learning needs of employees, and thus, making them feel valued.
💡The data in this regard shares that more than 90% of employees wouldn’t leave their workplace if the company spent resources on their career development.
For an organization, training programs are the way to provide this acceleration and support professional growth. A proper training strategy cultivates a sense of loyalty and commitment, decreasing employee turnover.
In other words, when offering training, the company sends a message to the worker: “You matter, let’s grow together”. As a result, an employee feels recognition and sees training opportunities for career growth within the company.
#3. Enhances company reputation
Employee reputation enhancement is for sure one of the corporate training benefits, even if not the obvious one. Why? Training is a crucial part of building an organization's culture and showcasing its commitment and dedication to fostering talent and innovation. The latter is crucial for future employee satisfaction and job choice.
💡Another Gallup report, on retention rates, indicates that 30% of respondents consider professional development and career acceleration to be “very important” when choosing a job.
What are the long-term effects on the employee brand?
- A solid learning culture can help you raise experts and promote important values among them, leading to recognized employee development opportunities.
- With employees' growth and leadership, you’ll be able to amplify the voice of your organization.
- By getting industry standing, you’re likely to attract an interested workforce and recruit talents more easily.
Read more: Best Training Tools for Employees
#4. Saves organizational resources and makes the company agile
What are other advantages of training for organizations? You can include organizational cost-efficiency and flexibility in the list.
Building a centralized learning system can help you optimize organizational processes and make them more agile to challenges.
💡Let’s take an example of an effective new employee training or onboarding program. The smooth program that is based on an internal wiki, self-paced courses, and several collaboration sessions can save a number of meetings and reduce time for employee integration.
The same applies to closing gaps and upskilling. With an effective L&D process in place, the company can handle skill development with the help of an internal workforce and collaborative projects.
In the long run, it can result in the creation of an internal academy and provide upskilling and reskilling with minimum participation of training companies.
Read more: How to Create an Online Training Program
#5. Strengthens workforce competitiveness
Other than that, organizations have an important goal of maintaining a competitive edge. And corporate training programs are vital to it.
💡McKinsey provides that almost 90% of respondents have or expect to experience skill gaps within their organizations in the next years.
If a company spends resources on analysis of the existing knowledge gap and foreseeing future trends, it can create the right learning and development programs for employees to stay ahead of the curve. That way, the company will be able to outperform its competitors.
💡 According to the Springboard report, 59% of organizations have difficulty finding a qualified workforce; while data analysis, project management, and AI are the hard skills that will be in the most demand.
If you have an L&D department, among the benefits of corporate training will be the ability to answer or at least identify the gaps. Next, it will be easier to cope with them by developing a roadmap and offering upskilling solutions.
Possible options will be to resort to training agencies, invite coaches or experts, and involve leaders to provide skill-based training.
Read more: Top Training Companies for Business
#6. Fosters innovation and adaptability
Besides, continuous training cultivates a culture of creative and strategic thinking and problem-solving among employees. In turn, it enables employees to generate innovative solutions to challenges.
💡Deloitte states that High Performing Learning Organizations are 92% more likely to innovate and 46% more prepared to meet future demands.
In this regard, the proactive approach developed by the culture of learning is the factor that can help navigate future uncertainties and make the workforce more adaptable.
Notably, collaborative development programs and coaching sessions focused on leadership are the ones that can make a difference. They are the leading training methods to support the space where ideas are shared and ensure the improvement of creative thinking.
#7. Improves employee engagement and morale
Why don’t we focus on the training benefits for employees? The crucial fact here is that corporate training is crucial for boosting employee morale. The provision of training is likely to make employees feel recognized and invested in.
💡According to Zippia, 58% of the workforce underlines that professional development adds to job satisfaction, while almost 70% of employees consider training and development to be the most important thing in the company.
Also, continuous learning leads to a more positive work environment by supporting corporate values and active behavior. How? It usually nurtures a culture of engagement, collaboration, and mutual respect.
In turn, it can strengthen relationships, affect employee turnover, and support internal communication and information exchange between departments.
Read more: Cohort Learning in the Workplace
#8. Develops future leaders
The benefits of employee training also relate to leadership and talent development. There, we should look at top talent incubators that include such companies as Google, PwC, McKinsey, Nestle, Siemens, Pfizer, JPMorgan, etc.
By heavily investing in training and development, they not only continue to produce leaders but also export them to other industries. How?
💡Harvard Business Review tells us that it is possible by “keeping their knowledge inside the company” and passing lessons “to the next generation”.
These incubators provide employees with unique knowledge and skills by providing proper onboarding, internal courses, job rotation, mentoring, coaching, and partnerships with other institutions. They refer to functional and industry expertise, soft skills, emotional intelligence, and decision-making.
💡In particular, 80% of the senior leaders of PwC, one of the top audit and consulting firms, came through leadership training programs existing within the company.
Your online training can take a similar approach, encouraging leadership skills across different levels preparing employees for managerial roles, and helping with career goals. It is possible via a focus on mentoring, regular feedback, cross-functional collaboration, and diversity.
#9: Aligns employee goals with organizational objectives
Lastly, another advantage lies in connecting employee goals to organizational objectives. What does it mean for employees? It provides clarity on their work, role, and business goals.
There, the strategic training and development concept plays a significant role.
💡Strategic training and development is the process of creating particular training programs that directly connect to certain company needs and objectives.
Through such corporate training initiatives, employees gain insights into how their roles and responsibilities fit into the broader organizational framework.
Simultaneously, the targeted corporate training programs are to affect organizational unity. The reason is that it will promote a shared understanding of objectives and strategies across all levels of the workforce.
How Does Training Foster a Stronger Workforce?
Considering all the benefits, training fosters a stronger workforce by closing skill gaps, affecting engagement and morale, bringing a culture of continuous learning, and bringing organizational unity.
With training and the right L&D strategy, the company can expand knowledge sharing and team cohesion. What is the best strategy in this regard? Encourage employees to collaborate and provide internal training sessions upon the learning needs or requests.
At the same time, continuous learning is crucial to the corporate culture and promotion of certain behaviors and values. There, the focus on creative thinking and leadership can bring innovative solutions and adaptability to the workplace.
Read more: Best Learning and Development Tools
What Is the ROI of Employee Training?
At the same time, not all training programs are so beneficial. The success of the employee training can be defined by ROI (Return on Investment).
💡In terms of L&D, the ROI of employee training is a financial benefit that the company gets from the employee learning programs compared to the costs it spends to handle them.
Yet, calculating the ROI of employee training is so easy. It involves dividing the monetary benefit value and the program’s total cost. The main issue lies in the fact that employee training benefits are often intangible.
How would you measure the effect on knowledge, productivity, engagement, and retention?
- Pay attention to changes in revenues, sales, and quality of service.
- Calculate how the company saved on the reducation of errors, rework, and customer turnover.
- Measure how much time you saved from the optimization of processes.
- Collect feedback from employees and whether they spend more time on tasks.
- Calculate hiring costs.
💡Tip: to make it easier to understand how good your training is, align training objectives to business goals and make them specific; pay attention to such models as the Kirkpatrick Model of Training Evaluation and Phillips Model of Training Evaluation.
Read more: Essential Metrics for Training Organizations
How can LMS help enhance the benefits of corporate training?
Importantly, the benefits of training typically depend on how you build a learning environment and what tools you use. The learning management system can be an effective way to present materials, organize instructor-led sessions, provide assignments, and manage learners.
How can it help with employee learning?
- Provide a centralized learning approach: LMS can act as a centralized hub for storing and accessing training materials and engaging with employees.
- Encourage communication and collaboration. Learning platforms often provide live-session tools and engagement features to communicate, share ideas, and review assignments.
- Offer insights and learner analytics: Most LMS allow administrators to track learner progress, completion rates, and stats. With such tools, you can identify areas for improvement and analyze training effectiveness.
EducateMe is a flexible and intuitive training platform that focuses on collaboration, learning management, and reporting. That way, you can handle various corporate training programs, from onboarding or coaching sessions to intensive or project-based courses.
Conclusion: Is it Time to Invest in Corporate Training Programs?
Yes, it is! As we explored the benefits of training employees, it’s clear that training fuels business growth and employee engagement. With the right strategy, a company can increase productivity and performance, reduce employee turnover, optimize resources, remain competitive, and bring innovation.
At the same time, significant training benefits lie in the realm of the corporate culture and the personal development of employees.
For your organization, it may become the tool to share values, improve communication and collaboration, and make people more engaged. In terms of employee growth, good training and development programs will open professional development opportunities, help them grow as quality leaders, and remain competitive.
So, if you are still thinking about whether to invest in corporate training or not, this article is a signal for you to take the first steps!