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It was another Monday morning. Tom had about a half an hour until the usual Monday morning manager meeting. Taking a sip of coffee, and leaning back in his chair, Tom starts to contemplate the problems he's going to have to address in the meeting ahead. How was he going to improve his division's performance? What was he going to do about the decision to hire more designers? What was the next step in his goal of raising staff morale?
Flipping through a stack of timesheets he noticed that the utilization numbers were slowly dropping. I guess that was the answer to the question of hiring more designers. The workload for now didn't require a new hire. The problem for Tom was that he knew there were some projects on the horizon that would soon have his team working overtime. He looked over at the small pile of resumes dropped off last week from the job fair at the Convention Center. He sighed. He dreaded the arduous task of interviewing a hundred people he would no sooner let wash his car than work on a design that affects hundreds if not thousands of people every day. It took a lot of looking to find the few people with real talent. Maybe he could hire someone to hire someone. No, that would never fly.
Wiping his eyes and taking another sip of coffee, Tom looks over and sees a flyer from his Software dealer touting their upcoming training sessions. Hey, maybe there was something to that. He grabbed the flyer from the middle of a stack of mail. This could be the answer to a number of Tom's problems. He quickly grabbed a pen and his corporate tablet and began scratching down some notes to take with him into the meeting.
“Training-” he began with a scribble, “Timing is right with a lower workload. We can get the staff trained up since their utilization numbers aren't peaking at this point. It will be easier to get them trained now, before the workload gets heavy. It is also a good idea to know the latest information before we start the new contracts. We can take some time to look at how we do our projects and make sure we have the skills updated for the latest software versions. If we need to hire more people to cover the workload we can make sure they are trained too.
“Return on investment – training will improve efficiency. Training will show our team members the best way to do what we need them to do. They will be able to complete tasks faster, which means the project will come in using less of the budget. If we decide to go into design-build projects, time is of the essence. The faster our team can do their job, the more projects we will be asked to join. With most of our team being self-trained on older versions of the design software, I think upgrading and training are our best options for improving efficiency.
“Raising team morale – investing in the team. By sending our team to training and seminars we are showing them that they are worth more than a warm chair to us. By sending them together we help build team unity. We have a good group of people working together now. Let's show them that we believe in them, and that we want them to be better at what they do. It's like a company picnic that will improve morale and knowledge.
“Attracting new talent – making training part of the incentive package. With outsourcing all over the news everyone is looking for a job that shows promise of longevity. By adding training to the incentive package we show new hires that we want them to stay. The idea that we not only want them to work for us, but want them to better their skill set appeals to the motivated worker, the kind of worker we want to attract.”
As he was laying his pen down, the alarm on Outlook sounded to let him know the meeting time was at hand. Tom looked up at the screen and smiled. He clicked his dismiss button and got up. Tablet and pen in one hand, half filled cup of coffee in the other, he walked confidently towards the big conference room. Tom had his answer. He knew what he would say when it came time for his two cents in the meeting. Training. Training was the answer to several of the problems Tom was responsible for fixing. |
