Team development in a 24/7 business

Many of the businesses and services we use every day run in a 24/7 environment. As a business owner or manager of these operations you will be more than aware of the challenges this brings compared to daytime operations.

Issues around security, staffing, logistics and client relationships are all too familiar. The question around team development comes up time and time again. ‘How do we figure out how to develop our teams in a 24/7 business? It can’t be done without it costing too much money or causing too much disruption.

Our clients are predominantly small or medium in size and they don’t have bottomless training budgets.  The cost of attending and travelling to training and team development sessions can be significant so it is important that it is the right option.  But what we do know is that having a well-developed team is vitally important for a business that relies on the good will of others to reach its goals.

Here’s some ideas from us on how to support team development: –

#Tip 1. On-line development

One cost and time effective option is to use online development options.  Through the pandemic, we moved to online learning, and it is an extremely cost-effective option. It allows individuals and companies to train at the point of need. It saves on travel time and costs and additionally, it allows for training to be broken down into more manageable chunks. For example, a typical 1-day course can be broken down into three 2-hour online sessions over a few months. Apart from helping with running your operation, we know that breaking the training up into bite size sessions and following up with ‘homework’ in-between, will embed the learning in a much better way. We have an extensive offering of online courses and can also provide a bespoke solution for you.

#Tip 2. Allocate weekly individual training time

Allowing each member of the team an allocated amount of their own training time each week has proved to be very effective. Staff members take ownership for their own development. Help them to find what they need by signposting them to various free online resources. There are a wealth of free tutorials, courses and other resources online that people can use to acquire and hone skills. Highlight them and make time for your team to take advantage of this. A YouTube tutorial might give more actionable advice on a specific area like pivot tables than a day-long excel course covering lots of extra, irrelevant stuff. Team members could take this further by sharing their top learning sites or clips with the rest of the team through social media, e.g., their own WhatsApp or Slack group. Here at Pro-Development, we love the idea of social learning and teams taking responsibility for their own development.

#Tip 3. Set up a mentoring programme

This is a guaranteed way of developing individuals and additionally developing the team. Utilising the knowledge and skills already present in the business has a deep and lasting impact. The purpose is to tap into the existing knowledge, skills, and experience of senior or high performing employees and transfer these skills to newer or less experienced employees in order to advance their careers. It doesn’t have to be over complicated or technical, a simple spreadsheet highlighting who fits the criteria along with who would benefit from mentoring. A great starting point is to use any data from your succession plans or from your one-to-one talks with staff. A quick internet search of Housing Trust Charities will give you more ideas on how to.

If you need some further help with this, please talk to us about our in-house coaching and mentoring course.

#Tip 4. Internal knowledge transfer

No matter what size your company is, you can guarantee that there are people in it with knowledge that others would find inspiring or benefit from hearing. Create an environment (and space) for people to share their knowledge – such as during a night time break where, for example someone from the Operations team explains how they are working with a new work flow system, or a front of house manager outlines how they manage customer relationships. Sessions like this are great: people enjoy talking about things they specialise in – and, even if it’s not directly helpful to their job – learning about different areas of the business is an interesting and rewarding process. We know from our experience that, often the staff may be experts in their field but lack either enough confidence or skills in training others. Looking at running train the trainer sessions can really pay off in the long run. The content is always kept up to date and relevant, the teams trust the trainer (as they are already a colleague) and there are no external delivery costs. Our train the train courses have proven to be very popular with SME’s, in fact, any company wanting to find ways of making the most from their training budget.

#Tip 5. Build (learning) communities

If you can build communities which revolve around sharing skills, knowledge and experience, you’ll have created a long-lasting standout space for team development. Noticeboards, Forums, Slack groups, 24/7 lunch and learn sessions, whatever the format will all strengthen how teams work together and how and what they learn.

#Tip 6. Recognise the value that developing your team will generate

Now that we have explored a number of tips you can implement in your business and it still feels like something that’s a nice to do rather than a need to do, please consider this.

Time and money spent on team development is not a sunk cost. This is a worry a lot of business owners have – they suspect that they’re going to pour money into developing people on their team, only to have them leave the business in the next couple of years.

The crucial thing to remember, however, is that investing money into your team is one of your best tools for making sure that they do stick around. At Pro-Development we have many years’ experience in working with clients on their employee engagement and can say that Learning and development is strongly linked to improved employee retention. A recent CBI survey found that people who believed their job contributed to their personal development were 21% more likely to stay with their employer.

Improved retention saves a lot of money. Replacing an employee is expensive and filled with hidden costs. People spend time on the hiring process rather than other tasks, the new employee will require onboarding and training, and will take time to reach peak productivity.

Add this up, and the cost of replacing an employee reaches eye-watering levels. A report from Oxford Economics placed the average cost for replacing a single member of staff at £25,000. Managers and more senior leaders almost certainly cost more – some other HR publications suggest that the true cost of turnover might be as much as double the employee’s yearly salary.

If there is anything in this blog you would like to know more about, please get in touch with us and also pay our website a visit to see what else we can offer.