Measuring the Effects of Training on Organisational Performance, Employee Engagement and Staff Retention
Presented at HR Metrics Conference - April 2010.
Caughey Preston Trust is an Aged Care provider. Our industry, being an aspect of the wider health sector, employs high numbers of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled staff from a wide range of cultural origins. A significant proportion of staff employed in the industry are low paid, work extremely hard, cope with intense work environments and have to communicate in English – their second language. It is not hard to see why leaving might be an attractive option.
Caughey Preston Trust employs 246 staff and to us, a key component of successful organisational performance and our most important HR Metric is our Staff Retention rate.
In order to hold the commitment of our staff we have focused on finding out what is important to them in order to do their job well and then made a commitment to improve in those areas.
There are two ways training and education can impact on Organisational Performance. The first is the obvious – training and education leads to increased knowledge and skill which then improves service delivery and client satisfaction.
The second is less obvious …
We believe that Staff Retention is underpinned by staff satisfaction, not the other way around. That if we have high levels of staff satisfaction we are likely to have strong staff engagement resulting in high staff retention which, in the end, impacts positively on overall organizational performance.
We actively seek ways to improve staff retention and our staff need to experience just how committed we are to them, that we listen to what they say and focus on what is important to them in order that they can do their job well.
We have focused on training and education as the vehicle to achieve that.
We don’t have complicated HR Metric systems.
What we do have are five simple yet robust measurement tools:
- a performance appraisal system aligned to the content of job descriptions which is rigorously implemented and routinely analysed
- a continuous review of disciplinary issues searching for patterns in performance which can be minimized by improved training
- a simple training satisfaction measurement tool
- an annual staff satisfaction survey which is analysed and resultant improvement actions prioritized and delivered
- a simple way of reporting and expressing staff retention
Our case study shares what we have done to get real value from our Performance Appraisal and Disciplinary processes to inform our training and education commitment and why we chose to focus on that.
It is a study on how we have leveraged training and education as a component of overall commitment to our staff while constantly working within a very tight budget and how that has improved staff satisfaction and ultimately, staff retention.
