KEYGroup® Current Articles Training firms teach businesses how to retain employees, serve clients UPPER ST. CLAIR -- After 20 years of consulting and training companies on what are commonly known as "soft skills," Joanne Sujansky is seeing more and more corporate leaders having to face hard reality. "The difference is, now employers are spending their money on what used to be called soft skills," said Ms. Sujansky, expressing a great dislike for the term. While soft skills training generally means such interpersonal skills as leadership training, teamwork and understanding change, the rising stakes of a more highly competitive job market are making them less a budgetary soft spot and more a bottom-line necessity. "It's not really soft skills," added Ms. Sujansky. "Now it's critical: it's must do." With a 4 percent unemployment rate and a lack of qualified employees a major barrier to company growth, businesses are turning to training firms such as Ms. Sujansky's Upper St. Clair-based Training Connection, to teach them how they can better keep the employees they have. "It's an extremely popular topic," said Jennifer Horner, spokeswoman for the American Society for Training and Development, of employee retention. "Across the board, everybody is talking about this." While Ms. Horner couldn't offer any statistics on how employee retention was impacting the training industry, the subject comes up again and again with Ms. Sujansky's clients. "In the last two or three years, it is one of our most demanded keynote topics," said Ms. Sujansky, who also works as a public speaker. Ms. Sujansky, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh for her work in organizational effectiveness and employee development, started Training Connection in 1980. Ms. Sujansky's company offers consulting and customized training, basing its services by observing a company's practices to gauge its training needs. While leadership training, managing change and persuasion skills have been her firm's three main disciplines, keeping quality employees has always been a theme of Ms. Sujansky's programs from the beginning, she said. "It has been ingrained in me to take a look at what a company does when it takes on an employee," she said. "From our earliest days, we stress the importance of what you do as leaders in your organizations to keep that stellar employee." Employee retention may be the largest issue companies must confront. "We are not going to have any relief from this labor shortage situation for probably eight to 10 years. And that's a minimum," said Joyce Gioia, who is publishing a book with her husband Roger Herman in April, "How to be an Employer of Choice." "The economic trend is, we've got baby boomers hitting the high consumption years of 46 to 54. That's fueling the economy," added Ms. Gioia. Instead of a lack of capital or natural sources, companies are finding their growth limited because of a lack of people. As an example, Ms. Gioia said that a lack of qualified employees cost one major car company $6 billion a year. Ms. Sujansky said she has received her share of feedback from corporate clients on the importance of employee retention. "Sometimes I'm sharp enough in my marketing skills to realize there's something we should be putting forward. You get your focus in a lot of ways," said Ms. Sujansky. "In some ways, I have clients to thank for saying, `Come back and do what you did here with a little bit more of a retention twist.' " That "retention twist" often means the kind of increasingly common topics that business managers should be acquainted with, such as generational differences, training, work-life balance and benefits. While such buzzwords become part of the common business vocabulary, Ms. Sujansky said the companies often have a hard time putting them into practice. "You might think that managers have the natural inclination to manage in a way to keep employees," she said. "But things get in the way." But if there is one consistent lesson from among the hundreds of companies and institutions in the United States and the other 26 countries in which she's worked, Ms. Sujansky said it is that the " `I tell/you do' school of management simply does not work as far as retaining people." What's increasingly important is offering employees opportunities for training and development. But as corporate universities become more popular, offering employees the kind of training that will make them more marketable, the approach can drift from a company's core business goals. Shelly Prochaska, an organizational development and training manager who is the chair of the training and development committee for the Society of Human Resource Managers, said she spends more time researching issues related to employee retention than she does training. She said she sees companies offer training more on what employees want, rather than what the companies need them to know to do their jobs. Ten years ago, she said, her company would have offered training that "would've been more immediately job related. Now, it's more focused on what the employees want to make them stay, what will make them more loyal to us." This article may be reprinted for your use in an organizational newsletter and or e-zine provided that you contact Kelly Hanna, Director of Sales and Marketing at 724-942-7900 to gain permission. |
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