When your aim is to achieve excellence within your business, the goal of a positive learning experience is to ensure employees are engaged and enjoying the process of developing their skills. Without this, there is no personal motivation from staff and the results you see will be underwhelming. 

Factors That Affect the Bottom Line

The consequence of your staff’s learning experience – positive or negative – will not only determine their personal development, but will have a knock-on effect right down to your business’s bottom line. Here’s how: 

Employees gain a multifaceted skillset

Without the right training, your business’s optimal performance cannot be achieved and certainly not sustained. Adding to your employees’ skillset is, in return, adding to your company’s capacity and offering – ultimately changing the customer experience. 

An impressive customer experience = new sales and brand loyalty. This is how you turn your desired cash flow into reality. 

Your business receives a tax incentive 

Skills development is one of the three key elements on the B-BBEE scorecard. This is in alignment with South Africa’s effort to increase our employment rate and reduce poverty. 

As a part of this effort – according to section 12H of the Income Tax Act – there are available tax incentives in connection to learnerships. With an opportunity to save R120 000 on taxable income reduction per learner for a company, you could see a greatly positive impact on cash outflow. 

For this benefit to be applicable, your employees have to reach a certain level of development with an acceptable throughput rate – an element which we pride ourselves on. Therefore, giving your staff a quality learning experience is essential to your business’s ultimate bottom line – directly affecting your liquidity.

Your business saves money

These days we’ve found that more and more employees are craving a flexible and convenient work schedule. This is why online training has become a vital factor to the learning experience and how employees react to their training. Although classroom learning most definitely has its place, giving staff the option to learn on the go gives them a sense of freedom in their job. 

Not only does this contribute to employee satisfaction, but also benefits your business’s productivity and therefore cash flow. How? Firstly, taking your employees away from their work day to participate in once-off training sessions is not making the best use of time, and is certainly not an effective method. Through a blended learning approach, employees receive ongoing lessons that they can complete in their own time, while they continuously develop their skills. This ensures a consistent and productive rhythm is kept, and avoids disruption within the business and work environment. 

What Are the Key Indicators That Your Employees are Having a Good Learning Experience?

Other than how it essentially affects your bottom line, there are some fundamental questions you can ask yourself when reflecting on the effectiveness of your staff’s learning experience:

• What percentage of learners have elected to do more programmes than their required development plan? Employees who engage with their training will likely complete more than the bare minimum. 

• What is your average attendance rate at training programmes? Below 82% is an indicator that employees are not finding value in their training.

• How well do staff perform on assessment? Your benchmark should be an 85% competency rate.

• What are the given error rates – for example shrinkage, wastage or resubmissions – in your organisation, post training interventions?

• How do staff rate their training experience a month thereafter? Getting feedback at this point eliminates possible bias that could occur with feedback received directly after training, and allows for time to assess how employees have applied their recently acquired knowledge.

The answers to these questions will reveal whether your training strategy needs some work. 

In conclusion, you cannot expect to see results from skills development training if employees aren’t engaging and connecting with the process. Statistics show that employees who feel they are receiving quality training are more likely to experience job satisfaction – which is how you increase motivation within the workplace. When staff feel an emotional connection to your business, your company’s success is ultimately their success too.

Give your employees a learning experience that will change the game and build the foundation for your business’ success.