Employment Costs – Starters and Leavers, the Expensive Gap

Why is it always you who has to make provision to cover staff sickness, absence and inefficiency?

You need more people, yet you’d never be able to make a case for an increase in headcount. Wouldn’t it be nice to go against all the management training and experience and just add another one to the payroll?

It’s all very well dreaming, but the bottom line for the manager is minimise cost and maximise output. You have to find ways to bring those new recruits up to speed quickly, but how long will it take before they give the same input to the team as the old hands they replace?

An overlap would be good, outgoing employee trains new starter. But, that’s still an effective increase in headcount and a decrease of productive people in the front line and it fails to cover those times when it’s impossible to plan the hand off.

You can’t skimp on training either, even though the quality checks you have in place will catch the errors, someone will still have to put the mistakes right and that costs time. Training sessions sideline not only the trainee, but the trainer is as well. Outsourced training might be good – but then, is an external trainer going to know how to achieve your internal efficiency?

It wouldn’t be so bad, but the new starters spend most of the early days doing very little, they can only start to perform a process once an experienced operative has taken time out to train them and then they’re restricted to just that process. Okay, they can also make the tea, but people can only drink so much tea in a day.

What would be ideal would be a way for them to discover the processes themselves without slowing anyone else down. That way they only need to be shown how to learn and where to learn.

Processes can be computer documented and stored in a common knowledgebase, once this is done it becomes relatively simple to create interactive learning modules. Computer movie demonstrations that show how to achieve each step of a process then require accurate input from the trainee before progress to the next stage.

Computer based interactive learning can cover simple subjects such as how to format a word processor document, to complex subjects such as product fault diagnosis.

Knowledgebase systems and computer based Learning Management Systems for interactive learning are already extensively used in commerce. The benefits are unquestionable and the cost savings can be substantial.

“Typically an LMS allows for learner registration, delivery of learning activities, and learner assessment in an online environment. More comprehensive LMSs often include tools such as competency management, skills-gap analysis, succession planning, professional certification|certifications, and resource allocation (venues, rooms, textbooks, instructors, etc.).” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_Management_system

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