Business agility requires reshaping the role of corporate training
Business agility requires more information faster to meet the demands of both shorter economic cycles and increasingly sophisticated and fickle 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. Against this background, it makes little sense to keep one of your best and most efficient sources of extremely practical and usable 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 your company must have that only costs money?
Time to think again!
What other departments can:
· Do you communicate directly with virtually everyone you do business with?
· Do you communicate quickly with those directly affected by major changes?
· Do you confirm when a solution works or not from real-time experience?
· Ask those affected for their opinions, solutions and suggestions.
· Try different solutions directly with those affected and get instant feedback?
However, most training departments are still viewed as burdens 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 To survive or thrive as an agile business, this outdated view of training must be corrected and quickly.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 HR to Marketing
- Outsource your training department to make it more efficient and profitable.
Transfer of training to marketing
Isn’t it the primary job of marketing to communicate with your market?
Now, what is training other than 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 the real potential of the training!
What better place to get feedback, directly from the source, than those who use, sell and service your products directly? Commissioning your coaches to be organizational scouts for information can bring new life and meaning to your entire team. They immediately become not only teachers, but external ambassadors for your company to your customers and internally for everyone who deals with them.
One objection to this simple but radical change is that sales and service already take care of this function. While this is true, customers are often much more on their guard when sales staff start asking questions, while most service staff tend to feel more at home with products than the customers who use them. It’s no secret that many service technicians often choose their profession so they don’t have to deal with people who prefer the quiet company of their tools and products. This is not so with coaches.
Trainers often feel at home talking to 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 interacting 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, efficiently processed, and improvements made. This increases your value to the business and can save a great deal of time, money, and frustration in product development, as well as sales and marketing strategy and tactics.
Outsourcing your training department
If moving training into marketing is radical, outsourcing your training department can almost be seen as heretical. However, moving your coaches from a backwater of your organization to a purely playful training company can transform often-neglected second stringers into an efficient world-class team. By pure game we mean a company whose main activity is training.
The benefits from such a movement can quickly accumulate:
· Costs go down As a purely professional training company it will produce more efficient training offerings than those produced by a costly expansion of human resources.
· No acceleration period It is required since that training is the same one that used to use and they are already professionals in what they do.
· Quality tends to improve as:
o Your former employees are now members of a dedicated and elite team. Your skills are now improved and used more effectively even in other projects, increasing your skills and experience.
o Your offer becomes better as other resources and the people that the pure company has now can also be implemented in your offer.
o The flow of usable information back to your organization improves as trainers become more effective in their new marketing exploration roles.
· Personnel costs are sinking as you are now hiring a service that you can regulate without the HR and payroll hassles associated with employees.
Ultimately, your training will never be worse than when you owned it in-house, and your costs are often reduced by 20-25%, while the quality and information collected increases, sometimes dramatically. The bottom line is that your organization’s entire business agility index increases rapidly, ensuring a more stable and profitable future.