Training is an essential tool for businesses that offers many benefits to employers – such as better performance, improved adherence to policies and procedures, fewer mistakes, lower costs, and greater employee engagement and retention.

Effective training also ensures that employees are better equipped with the knowledge to carry out their roles – thereby reducing pressures on management and promoting service quality.

In the UK, training is legally required under several areas of compliance legislation, including the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and the Health And Safety At Work Act (1974). Under this legislation, employers are legally obliged to provide employees with all the information necessary to keep themselves, their colleagues, and their private data safe.

For many small businesses, training can initially seem like an expense. But it is an important step towards ensuring your business is compliant and promoting efficient work practices.

The Advantages Of Staff Training

Training offers a wide variety of benefits to employers and staff, including:

• Improved productivity and performance
• Reduced waste, complaints, and operational issues
• Improved staff motivation, engagement, and leadership skills
• Reduced staff turnover and time spent off work unwell
• Greater business growth and adaptation
• More staff motivation to improve their skills and progress their careers

These benefits can help your business to reduce expenditure and bring in greater sources of revenue, while improving service quality and overall employee performance.

Our Top Five Training Programmes For SMBs

1. Cybersecurity

With online sales accounting for 30% of all online sales, an increase in remote working, and the majority of businesses choosing to use electronic resources such as email for communications, it’s more important than ever to be up to speed on cybersecurity.

Businesses can also lose a significant amount of revenue if they are subject to a cyberattack, or if they are unable to access their website. In addition, under GDPR, all businesses who collect personal data are responsible for protecting against data breaches and may be liable to fines if legislation is not correctly adhered to.

Cybersecurity training teaches your employees how to identify and avoid a cybersecurity attack, reducing the risk of phishing emails, data leaks, viruses, and hacks. This can save your business time, money, and stress, and promotes adherence to cybersecurity policy.

2. Communication

Poor communication can affect all areas of work, not just overall productivity.

A survey by Salesforce found that 86% of employees and executives identified communication issues as a major cause of failure in business, while 97% of employees reported that communication breakdown affects their efficiency on a daily basis. And these issues affect employees’ ability to adhere to deadlines, with 28% of employees reporting that these factors made them unable to deliver work on time.

Communication training can help to fix these issues by training your employees to share information accurately and clearly, to resolve conflicts within the team or with customers, and to be confident when communicating their perspective – thereby helping to eliminate potential strategy pitfalls before they occur. This helps to save your business time and money, and assists with alleviating pressure in the workplace.

3. Diversity And Unconscious Bias Training

Unconscious bias training identifies any underlying prejudices that your staff may have, and helps them to address these issues in order to prevent potential conflict or discriminatory treatment.

According to CIPHR, more than a third of UK employees feel that they have been discriminated against in the workplace, or when applying for a job. The most commonly reported source of discrimination in the workplace was age (11%), followed by gender (5.3%) and race (4.1%).

Diversity and Unconscious Bias Training is a crucial tool for limiting the impacts of social prejudice in the workplace, and for keeping your employees and customers safe from abuse and violence.

With an increasingly diverse workforce – and a legal duty to protect employees from physical or emotional harm – it is necessary for employers to be aware of their responsibility to employees from other racial and cultural groups and backgrounds.

4. Conflict Resolution Training

Conflict comes up in all ways of life, and work is no different.

Effective conflict resolution is key to ensuring effective communication and productivity by improving team relationships, and helps to reduce the risk of behaviour escalation and workplace violence by training your employees in de-escalation techniques.

Conflict resolution also helps to improve relationships with clients by training your team in the most effective ways to respond to members of the public who become unhappy, agitated, or aggressive when making a complaint.

5. Time Management Training

If your business is searching for a way to improve employee productivity, time management training may offer an effective solution. With assigned roles becoming broader, and an increased need to keep up with online resources, it can be difficult for employees to prioritise tasks.

Time management training teaches your employees critical organisational skills to ensure that work is carried out efficiently and to a high standard. This also can help your employees to reduce their stress levels, thereby reducing their time spent off work unwell (which in 2019 averaged 4.4 days per absence), and improving your staff retention rates.