Reasons for not training staff?

buel10

Hi all.

I was talking to a Director of the company I work for today and I explained how the employees would like to be told what they need to do in order to get to the next pay grade as opposed to being told that they 'weren't ready' or some other reason.

I was taken aback by his reply of "Well it's like the NHS, they need nurses and surgeons, not all surgeons. We need some people to stay on their level and pay grade". I personally found this astonishing as I thought any business would thrive with better trained employees. However, I'm willing to admit that I could not be seeing the bigger picture here or that I'm missing something.

Please can I have some thoughts on this?

Thank you.

[Deleted User]

Get what he is saying, if people better themselves and move up and possibly on elsewhere after he's paid to train them he has to replace them and do it all again. He wants to keep people down, in their place and save himself time and money. Which I find absolutely disgusting.

motorguy

buel10 wrote: »

Hi all.

I was talking to a Director of the company I work for today and I explained how the employees would like to be told what they need to do in order to get to the next pay grade as opposed to being told that they 'weren't ready' or some other reason.

I was taken aback by his reply of "Well it's like the NHS, they need nurses and surgeons, not all surgeons. We need some people to stay on their level and pay grade". I personally found this astonishing as I thought any business would thrive with better trained employees. However, I'm willing to admit that I could not be seeing the bigger picture here or that I'm missing something.

Please can I have some thoughts on this?

Thank you.

Its a pretty reasonable statement to me - you cant have "everybody" at the highest pay grade, particularly when you dont need them to be. Chances are he knows for every 10 entry level people he needs say, 2 senior people to get the work done.

If he'd 10 senior people then chances are no extra work would get done, or widgets produced, or whatever but his cost base has went up.

Likewise, training costs money, people are not working while they're doing training so effectively you're paying twice - once for the training and once for the loss of earning capability, and a lot of people get trained up then !!!!!! off elsewhere.

My wife has a similar problem where she works - shes head of a call centre group. Everyone expects to come in on the phones and be a team leader in 6 months time. The problem is they only need 1 manager for say, 15 people, so that would just leave too many chiefs and not enough indians. Likewise progression through the pay grade just raises her cost base, as she usually cant charge that on to clients so having trained up expensive staff just reduces her margins.

boliston

Generally there will be staff that wish to progress their careers and staff who simply want to work to pay their bills - trying to hold staff back will simply result in high turnover as they move elsewhere.

motorguy

boliston wrote: »

Generally there will be staff that wish to progress their careers and staff who simply want to work to pay their bills - trying to hold staff back will simply result in high turnover as they move elsewhere.

Likewise, too many people at too high a pay hits your margins. Theres a balance to be had, but you cant just go round training everyone up and paying everyone top dollar just on the off chance they might leave.

There will always be people you identify as people you want to keep and invest time and money in, others you wont mind if they move on. The trick if you're an employee is to make sure you're one of the former....

BorisThomson

_shel wrote: »

Get what he is saying, if people better themselves and move up and possibly on elsewhere after he's paid to train them he has to replace them and do it all again. He wants to keep people down, in their place and save himself time and money. Which I find absolutely disgusting.

He wants to keep people doing the job they were employed to do. What's disgusting about that? Those who show potential may be trained up, those who do not will continue to do their job. Anyone is free to leave if they wish to do so.

bugslet

I have 23 staff, one is a finance manager that's been with me 17 years, the other an operations manager that's been with me around ten years. The rest are drivers. I train the drivers for their jobs, tachometer legislation, carrying hazardous goods etc. Not much point me training them to do the accounts and payroll or how to run the trucks legally. And my staff stay for decades, so they can't be that unhappy.

boliston

bugslet wrote: »

I have 23 staff, one is a finance manager that's been with me 17 years, the other an operations manager that's been with me around ten years. The rest are drivers. I train the drivers for their jobs, tachometer legislation, carrying hazardous goods etc. Not much point me training them to do the accounts and payroll or how to run the trucks legally. And my staff stay for decades, so they can't be that unhappy.

Sounds quite an unusual setup with no admin staff, no sales & marketing staff, no IT staff? Are all these functions outsourced?

getmore4less

it's not just business and workplaces it is society.

You need people to do the mundane tasks.

many jobs don't need smart highly educated people.

remember that even burger flipping is a stretch for some.

the real smart people will work out what they need to do to progress don't have to ask or be told.

bugslet

boliston wrote: »

Sounds quite an unusual setup with no admin staff, no sales & marketing staff, no IT staff? Are all these functions outsourced?

It's a small company. I'm the MD, but I also do operations, arrange maintenance, training, the basics of employment stuff, the invoicing. Finance manager does all things erm finance including payroll, deals with phone contracts, fuel cards, IT such as it is. Ops manager is at another base and covers a lot of my functions. We don't, nor ever have, done any selling or marketing; I'm quite comfortable with the level of work I have.

We outsource H&S, otherwise most of everything we do ourselves.

I have various philosophies and one is the keep it simple theory. We find a supplier we like and we rarely change unless something goes drastically wrong, we certainly don't move around to save a bit of money. And all the processes are kept as simple as possible. It makes everything easy. I look at some other firms and they seem to unnecessarily drown themselves in paperwork.

Geoff1963

The pay grade will come with a need to do a more difficult job, so if we don't need more people doing that, there is no value in them being more qualified ; in fact, they'll be more unhappy at not being promoted. What the company needs to do is grow ; because if the pyramid is bigger, then everyone who wants to, can move up. If a hospital has 100 nurses, they need senior and very senior nurses ; who are probably paid more than the junior doctors.