Treat Your Employees Right

Each year the Eastern Ontario Training Board sponsors the “Employee First” Award.  This award is presented as part of the Cornwall Chamber of Commerce Annual Business Awards dinner. It is presented to a small, medium or large business that has good labour relations and has demonstrated that they care about their employees by offering them added opportunities for education, training, personal and work skills development.

Johns Manville, Best Western Parkway Inn & Conference Centre & Kraft Canada Ingleside have been the recipients of this award over the last three years.

Treating employees right includes offering them opportunities for development. Businesses increase their risk when they neglect staff development.  The result will be reduction in productivity and quality, as well as the hard expenses of hiring.

Training and development improve effectiveness of employees and ultimately the company.  Often the thinking can be that as long as the employees have the necessary skills to do the job, why bother to further train?

You want to succeed? Well then the objective is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better. That creates success in business & management. It’s important to get and keep good staff.  Get the right people, give them the training to get going, pay them, treat them with respect, provide appropriate benefits, and develop them. 

There is a distinction between training to do the job, and development to prepare for another, bigger job within the company.  That is a decision the business must make to either prepare employees just for their current jobs or ready them for succession in the company.  Yet we all know that there is a perception specialized training may not add to the company’s “plate of skills” and general development is something that will go with the employee.  Still some firms are showing productivity gains by choosing to train in select business areas, such as customer service, more intensively.

When skills fall behind, productivity levels are among the first areas to suffer.  Efforts in downsizing continue to add new pressures and employees have been required to take on additional roles with unfamiliar responsibilities and that is a recipe for overwork and stress.  Did you know that absenteeism last year cost Canada’s business community over $3 billion.  How many of those dollars were yours?

A perfect example of why you should train is when the administrative assistant leaves.  They work with the company president for years and do everything, even accounting, and suddenly they’re gone.  Having not trained anyone else can have a major impact, and the company is temporarily lost. It happened to me this year. Good thing I had hired and started to train a second person. Whew!!

I encourage you to get your office staff to join a networking group where during the course of every meeting there’s a training component with a speech or a talk or take upgrading or new skills courses at colleges or other training providers.

Offer employees workshops on your premises.  Why not? Offer them tuition reimbursement plus time off if the course is during working hours.  It’s a great investment! After all, their new skills are most likely going to benefit your bottom line plus show that you are a caring employer who intends to be good to them while still keeping a close eye on the bottom line.

For more information, please contact the EOTB's Executive Director, Denis Thibault: 613.932.0210 or denist@eotb-cfeo.on.ca