You’ve heard this before: “Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for the day. Teach him how to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime.”  This method creates a win-win situation for both, the manager and the employee, therefore, it benefits the organisation as a whole. Best ROI for training employees, ever. Here’s why:

1. Learning something retains employees.

TrainingIndustry.com predicts that total spending for training services will increase by an estimated 7-9% in 2011. (You can read their full post here.) This trend is expected to increase and backed up by the Learning Executives Confidence Index. The LXCI found that executives expect an improvement on spending in training. Why? Because it’s more cost effective and the rewards are far greater than getting new employees into the organisation. And if you can create a work environment where your employees are learning constantly, everyday, you won’t even have problems with folks not turning up on time in the mornings!

2. Employees can improve processes once they know them.

If you have employees who can cut the process of say, getting an email campaign out in half the time, save the organisation a couple of thousand dollars and free up staff time to have them concentrate on core activities that actually contribute to your bottom line, wouldn’t you let them do it? Rules are sometimes meant to be broken or bent. Time is still the world’s most precious commodity. Save your organisation time and you can immediately improve the bottom line. Save your customers’ time, and they will love you and recommend you to the whole world.

3. Survive the “If You Get Hit By A Bus” scenario.

Brilliant internal documentation aids in having employees know exactly how to execute in the event of anything. I wrote about this briefly on HR Tool box here. The operating word here is “aid” -- documentation, while I’m a big fan of it, can only aid, the skill set to practically execute is still something an employee needs practice with. Just because I can turn around figures in one marketing campaign in a short span of time doesn’t mean I can do the same with the next one simply because the variables might be not the same. For example, everyone wants to ‘go viral’ like Facebook, there’s a lot of well documented books, blog posts et cetera out there but you can’t just make something ‘viral’ if you don’t have the right ingredients or variables.

4. All actors can play the part

I love football (soccer for you Americans), and stage acting because it’s all about team play and achieving a common goal while doing different things within a context of certain rules. Plus it’s live, there’s nothing more thrilling than live, on-demand, or real-time. It’s real, it’s happening, it’s now. If your team knows all the rules, and all the processes to execute, and all the ways to handle exceptions, you can achieve the right set of goals. If you don’t believe me, I dare you to try it.

5. Develop a real fan base

I’m not talking about Facebook Fans here. I’m talking about developing a loyal following of a team who will travel with you to different ventures, whatever you start, they will come back to you, give you advice, information, get you connected to the right people, and promote you freely, and happily and maybe even hire you if you need a job. It’s not the stuff of dreams, it actually happens more often than we talk or write about. Why?

Because once a person knows how to fish for an entire lifetime, They will tell that to their life partners, children, and grandchildren, the next set of colleagues, bosses et cetera... you get the idea. It will act as a word of mouth marketing piece for your employer brand (at both the organisation and individual levels), and have folks lining up to work with you.

Have you taught anyone or did you have a mentor who taught you how to fish? What was it like?

Photo by Charles Fred