One of my favorite aspects about my job is training people to be better at their job or business.  I believe the more people understand what they are doing and why they are doing it a particular way, the more effective they will be.  The more effective they are, the fewer the mistakes.  Every job task has a learning curve.

I’ll use a company that sells on eBay for an example.  The products they offer are related to the entertainment industry.  The owner, who I will not mention by name is very short sited when it comes to training his employees.  It’s not difficult to pull an item off the shelf and package it to ship, but if the person performing the task isn’t properly trained and there are no verification steps along the way, it can become a big problem very quickly.

One of the most common issues this company experiences is shipping the wrong product to the wrong person.  This is a very bad practice to begin with, but doing this on eBay or sites similar to eBay can get you in some serious trouble.  Lack of training was the primary issue.  The owner was so worried about getting the orders out as quickly as possible, he didn’t feel spending time on training was necessary.  That’s mind boggling to me.  He would rather deal with the stress related to unhappy buyers than ensure his employees were properly trained.  He refused to consider the profit loss too! Can you relate?

I see this with a lot of companies.  It seems that training is a necessary evil and the objective is to get it done as quickly as possible.  It’s this mentality that causes rework profit loss.  “Get the job done right the first time” doesn’t seem to be a priority for many companies.  If they would just do the math, they would realize how costly poor training really is.  Sending out a wrong item may not seem that costly, but it can add up over time, not to mention the adverse effect it has on a company’s reputation.

Let’s break it down:

-Wrong item shipped

-Customer is unhappy with their transaction

-Company pays for the customer to return the item – additional cost to company

-Company ships out the correct item the second time – another additional cost to the company

-Depending the profit of the original transaction, the two additional shipping costs can wipe out the profit.

-Finally, what kind of feedback is the buyer going to leave the seller?  Well, that depends on the buyer and the seller’s communication.  I’ve seen it result in neutral or negative feedback especially when the corrective action was not taken in a timely manner.  On some occasions the buyer will leave positive feedback if they receive a free gift or something which can be an additional cost to the seller.

So if you have employees, I encourage you to put training high on your priority list.  Don’t be so concerned about increasing your profit too soon and rushing a new employee.  Put yourself in their shoes and think about how long it too you to learn a new job task.  The increased productivity will come and profits will increase when proper training is provided.  If you don’t believe me, do the math whenever something goes wrong!

To your ongoing success!

Lori

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