Business agility calls for reorganizing the role of corporate training
Business agility requires more information faster to meet the demands of both shorter business cycles and increasingly sophisticated and capricious customers. Regardless of your industry, if you don’t provide what your customers want when and how they want it, they will increasingly disappear to a competitor without saying goodbye. With this as background, it makes little sense to keep one of your best and most efficient sources of extremely practical and useful information buried deep within your company.
For too long, most corporate training departments have languished in a dark, dusty closet somewhere in the bowels of their Human Resources department. Why?
Most of the time because that’s how it’s always been done. Do you also still see training as a necessary evil that your company must have and that only costs money?
Time to think again!
What other departments can:
· communicate directly with virtually everyone you do business with?
quickly contact those directly affected by major changes?
confirm when a solution works or doesn’t work from real-time experience?
ask those affected for their views, solutions and suggestions?
test different solutions directly with those affected and get instant feedback?
However, most training departments are still considered a burden rather than one of the most efficient marketing tools available! To survive or thrive as an agile business, this outdated view of training must be corrected quickly. There are two powerful solutions that can be implemented together or separately to help you make this influential change.
- Move your training department from Human Resources to Marketing
- Outsource your training department to make it more effective and profitable.
Transfer training to marketing
Isn’t marketing’s main job communicating with your market?
Now, what is training but a service to communicate the latest and greatest that your organization has to offer both internally and externally? However, as powerful as this task is, this is only half of the actual potential of the training!
What better place to get feedback, straight from the source, than from those who use, sell and service your products directly? Tasking your coaches with being organizational scouts for information can breathe new life and meaning into your entire team! At the same time, they not only become teachers, but also external ambassadors of their company to their customers and internally to all those who deal with them.
One objection to this simple but radical change is that sales and service already take over this function. While this is true, customers are often much more on their guard when salespeople start asking questions, while most service people are often more comfortable with the products than the customers using them. It’s no secret that many service technicians choose their profession to avoid dealing with people who prefer the quiet company of their tools and products. This is not so with coaches.
Trainers often feel at home chatting with clients. The implementation of this organizational change allows for a drastically different relationship where critical information can now be gathered using professional communicators and without the perceived risk of having to buy something! Trainers generally love to interact with their participants and can easily integrate more market-oriented conversations into what they already do. This information can then be quickly and efficiently delegated to the right parties, processed efficiently, and improvements made. This increases your value to the company and can save significant amounts of time, money, and frustration on product development, as well as sales and marketing strategy and tactics.
Outsourcing of your Training Department
If moving from training to marketing is radical, outsourcing your training department can almost be seen as heresy. However, moving your trainers from a backwater in your organization to a pure training company can transform the often neglected seconds into an effective world-class team. By pure-play we mean a company whose main activity is training.
The benefits of such movement can quickly accumulate:
· Lower costs as a pure training company it will produce more efficient training offerings than those produced by an expensive extension of human resources.
· No acceleration period it is necessary as those trainings are the same people you used to employ and they are already professionals at what they do.
· The quality usually improves as:
o Your former employees are now members of a dedicated and elite team. Your skills are now enhanced and used more effectively even in other projects, increasing your skills and experience.
o Your offering improves as other resources and people that the pure gaming company has can now be implemented into your offering as well.
o The flow of usable information into your organization improves as trainers become more effective in their new market-seeking roles.
· Staff costs sink since you are now hiring a service that you can regulate without the HR and payroll issues associated with employees.
Finally, your training will never be worse than when you had it in-house and your costs are often reduced by 20-25% while the quality and information collected is increased, sometimes dramatically. The bottom line is that your organization’s overall Business Agility Index is increasing rapidly, ensuring a more stable and profitable future.
