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2002 2003

Breakthrough Article

To Train or Not To Train?

I find it interesting that each contractor I speak with struggles with the same issues. What is even more fascinating is that after uncovering these issues; the solution is always the same. “Education.” It’s as simple as that.

No one is born being great at anything, some of us have aptitudes in certain areas, but the bottom line is we either learn from watching, listening or doing. There are all types of tests we can take to determine our dominant learning behavior. The truth is, from the time we were born, until the time we are gone, we are learning.

On my desk I have a note, (I actually leave many notes around my computer to remind me of the little messages that can mean so much.) One note that I think really applies here is one I actually came up with. It’s called “LIFE.” No, I know what you are thinking; the word life has been around forever. Actually it’s not the word but what each letter represents for me. Here it is; L = Learning, I = Is, F = For, E = Ever, “Learning Is For Ever.” It’s really just as simple as that.

I keep that note next to one that I didn’t come up with, but one that I believe goes hand in hand with “LIFE.” This one say’s; “The more valuable an owner is to his or her business, the less valuable the business is.” Now if you are an owner, truer words couldn’t be spoken, unless of course you are all about control and you only want your people to know just enough. But lets face it; you don’t have to be a Rhoades Scholar to know that a business built on that type of mentality is doomed for failure. Even if the intentions behind the actions are good, putting yourself in the position where everything funnels through you and people aren’t thinking for themselves is destructive, physically, emotionally, and mentally.

So how do you get your business to a healthy learning environment? Promote education. I am assuming that you do regular performance evaluations on your people, I am also assuming that at a minimum, annual pay increases are given to at least reflect the CPI, but shouldn’t the goal be to give pay increases based on more than just the cost of living? Hopefully you answered yes, but with the understanding that you need to have the money to give. And after all, if your company isn’t making a profit it’s hard to get blood from a stone, and isn’t that sometimes how it feels?

Let’s take a trip to my favorite place for business training; it’s called “Fantasy Island.” On this trip we are going to discuss how to increase profits, decrease overhead and improve productivity. Now in order to do this you are going to ask all your employees to work really hard, find new ways to do things, and develop ways to better take care of your customers. Then with your current training budget you are going to send a few techs for Building Automation or RSES classes, maybe your sales team is going to a sales training class or your executives to ACCA’s annual meeting or one like it. Now, let’s assume that you have 100 employees, you have basically just addressed maybe 10-20% of them but you are asking for results from 100%, does this make sense? Maybe, but only on Fantasy Island.

Now lets talk real world. Lets assume that you are going to send that 20% of your people away and history shows us a cost of $2,500.00 to $3,500.00 each, not including lost work time. If you only sent 10 people away, that would represent an average training budget of $30,000.00, a very substantial investment. Obviously at that price you couldn’t afford to send all of your people away each year, it just doesn’t make good financial sense.

But what if you could provide unlimited access to learning materials for all 100 employees, information that would help them personally, as well as information that would help your business, your customers, and hopefully your bottom line. Would something like this help you? What if your team could access the information at work or at home, does this sound flexible enough?

If you were to take a company of 100 and purchase an ePL membership for $990.00, you would be paying $9.90 per employee. Does this sound like an employee benefit you should be without? Now lets talk evaluation, if each employee found one piece of ePL educational content that made a difference for them in their job, and that difference meant you either kept a customer, acquired a new one, found a way to reduce overhead, or found a more efficient process, what would that represent in additional revenue to your businesses’ bottom line? Wouldn’t it be easier to give that raise, pay that bonus, or announce that promotion? It would certainly pay for a membership… over and over and over again.

Aren’t Building Automation Systems now digital, not pneumatic? Isn’t part of the reason we use them because the technology is available to us and overall those systems do more for less? By taking advantage of technology, on going education for your employees can now be found online. Shouldn’t we take advantage of that technology as well? Don’t we owe it to our people? And to ourselves?

ePL and its advisors have been, and will continue to provide bite size pieces of relevant information to help your business and its people get to that next level. We provide text, presentations and worksheets, the kind of information that is proven to work in today’s HVAC industry.