How to improve employee satisfaction and achieve business success

An article recently posted on LinkedIn by CW EDC highlighted that a lack of training is hindering growth in many small to medium businesses. While training requires resources and as such can be costly in terms of time and money, it is absolutely essential to ensuring the success of your business.

What training ultimately produces is an employee who is comfortable in their role and feels empowered to make the right decisions. In the end, employee empowerment may make or break your business. Gallup shows how employee engagement can in fact directly predict a number of key performance indicators like profitability, customer ratings and low absenteeism. Initial training is however only a first step in the right direction towards engagement and satisfaction, and only continuous efforts to empower employees reap benefits in the long run.

Below we outline how training and ongoing development can increase the work satisfaction of your employees, how business intelligence can assist in improving motivation, and ultimately how your business can benefit.

Trained employees make fewer mistakes

Training is key to empowering employees to make the right decisions for a business. Employees who are trained will make decisions based on what they have learnt rather than on hunches they may have. This allows an employee to make fewer mistakes. And fewer mistakes means you as a manager spend less time correcting mistakes and avoid dissatisfied customers - which could result in a loss of revenue. Needless to say, getting compliments and positive feedback through making excellent decisions feels much better than being reprimanded over poor decisions. Making the right decisions can as such cause employees to gain confidence and connectedness to colleagues through feelings of support. This in turn makes an employee more likely to be satisfied with their work, and stay with the business.

Employees seek opportunities to develop

Training should not simply stop once an employee is confident in using the tools and making the decisions required for his or her role. Humans are intrinsically motivated to learn and develop, and the key to keeping talent within the business over the longer term may be to give further training opportunities. A useful way to think about the ROI associated with a training is that if employees are not given opportunities for further development, and they stay in the business, this is essentially a loss of profit. At least compared to training employees who will further support business growth with new initiatives and strong motivation.

Business intelligence can motivate employees and track ROI from training

One way to keep talent within the business is through training, and another is through empowering through data. Motivating an employee to work in innovative ways encourages them for a certain amount of time, but to truly sustain this motivation they must be able to see the outcome of their efforts. Business intelligence like Phocas can present these outcomes to them in a simple and understandable manner. Furthermore, they can use Phocas to see what they have not improved, or where performance is dropping off. This can teach an employee about important aspects of their own performance and can encourage proactivity that may result in big increases in performance.