By Charlie Wonderlic
Ensuring success through training
Rejoice, HR departments! Training is an important key to success! This is the conclusion of recent study by a professor of business administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It has caused a stir of excitement throughout the industry, and right now you might be scratching your head and wondering why. Of course training is an important key to a company’s success, you may be thinking. People can’t do their jobs without proper training. Why did they need a study to prove it?
Well, it’s a bit more complex than you might imagine.
I’ve written previous columns about the ongoing quest of training departments trying to earn a seat at the boardroom table. The crux of the issue is this: Because training deals with relative intangibles - hiring, job satisfaction, learning, people’s happiness and of course, training - it has been difficult for HR and training departments to prove their worth in bottom-line numbers. Unlike sales, which proves its worth every day, HR has traditionally languished near the bottom of the list of corporate players. HR deals with warm-and-fuzzy people issues, not hard numbers.
Because of that general attitude, it has been difficult for HR and training departments to influence corporate policy, garner funds for new technology and initiatives and in general, prove their worth in terms of the company’s bottom line.
Thanks to this new study, that may not be the case anymore.
Here are the particulars: The study, with the cheery, upbeat title of: "Entrepreneurial Failure: The Case of Franchises," focused on 90 national chains in the fast-food franchise industry. The purpose of the study was to find out whether those franchisors help their franchisees to succeed or contribute to their failure.
Franchises have an excellent success rate. That’s the point of franchising rather than starting one’s own restaurant from scratch - the nationally-known name and reputation. After all, how often have you seen a McDonald’s restaurant fail? But, as the study points out, even with all of those positives, some franchised restaurants do fail. The study wanted to find out why.
What did it find? The difference between success and failure is training. Those franchises with the best training programs have the most successful franchisees.
It’s not difficult to extrapolate those results to other industries as well. In fact, we should. Franchises have a higher built-in success rate than other types of business simply because they’re franchises. Those companies and industries with a higher failure rate (start-up companies and single restaurants, for example) absolutely need to take notice, especially in tough economic times.
It’s a key point, because, as most HR directors know, typically the first thing cut when companies are weathering a shaky economy is the budget for HR. You can hear the corporate objections now: Who needs those fancy employee-enrichment programs? What, more online training? Do we really need that new technology designed to hire the best employees? No, we can’t attend that conference.
However, judging from this study, those are the very things that will keep a company afloat. The better trained people are, the better the company is going to do. In short, HR departments, there is now concrete, academic proof of what we’ve known all along: YOU are the key to your company’s success.
For more information, please contact:
William Geheren
Wonderlic, Inc.
1795 N. Butterfield Rd.
Libertyville, IL 60048-1212
800.323.3742
william.geheren@wonderlic.com
