Dear Ashish,
Conducting training in itself does not save revenue. You should have outcome based training. For this you need to study systems and processes of each department, find out what costs are involved, measure them. Any training programme conducted should aim at cost reduction or maintain costs at certain level. It appears that numbers were not included in your reply. When I say numbers, I did not mean to say how many training programme did you conduct or how many persons were trained, but what was the result of the training in what span of time.
Training on motivation and team building is at times humbug. You need to embed all these things in the systems and process. These things should be embedded in the culture of the company as well.
You are from auto company or auto component manufacturing company. Have you identified costs involved in upstream and downstream supply chain? Are your training efforts addressed to reduce these costs?
Third way of generating revenue is by making employees to self-learn. Many things employees can learn on their own also. Why do they need someone else to train? HR or Training Department's role is there to measure the competency and accredit them. Self-learning saves lot of revenue of the company. However, this is far easier said than done. It requires tremendous organisational maturity and you need to have that kind of knowledge assets available.
Examples of outcome based or cost-based trainings are as below:
a) Sales: - sales training is conducted to improve the strike ratio from ____ to ____
b) Production: - production staffs are trained to improve/maintain OEE from ____ to ____.
c) Purchase: - procurement staffs are trained to improve Inventory Turnover Ratio from ____ to ____ or maintain at ____ level
In India, HR does not take much initiative in organising outcome based training. When I say outcome based, I mean to say conducting training to reduce some cost. They will talk lot of HR jargon but scratch a surface and ask them about operational costs and they will blinking.
Just yesterday, I spoke with Head of Training of one of the prominent FMCG company. We discussed about training for FMCG sales persons. I told him that FMCG salespersons are part of downstream supply chain. They do not do any "selling" as such. You tell me what costs are involved in the downstream supply chain and I will give you the training solution to curtail those costs. That training head did not agree for my initiative. He had fancy of idea of conducting simulation for the participants. HR professionals understand little that case studies, role plays, games and simulations etc are all the training techniques. These are the means to attain the goal. How can you make means as your goals?
This very immaturity of HR speaks loudly when country like India does not have any company that figures in the top 25 supply chains of the world.
Jai Ho India's HR!
Dinesh V Divekar
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