Friday Filosophy v.03.25.2022

Friday Filosophy v.03.25.2022

Patrick Jake O’Rourke (November 14, 1947 – February 15, 2022) was an American libertarian political satirist and journalist. O’Rourke was the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio‘s game show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! He was a columnist at The Daily Beast from 2011 to 2016. 

He authored 16 books, including three that made The New York Times Best Seller list. The Forbes Media Guide Five Hundred, 1994 states, “O’Rourke’s original reporting, irreverent humor, and crackerjack writing makes for delectable reading. He never minces words or pulls his punches, whatever the subject.” 

  • There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
  • Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
  • Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
  • You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.
  • Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.
  • If you think health care is expensive now, just wait ’til it’s free.
  • Think what evil creeps’ liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.
  • The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you’re rich.
  • There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.
  • When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

The Time is Now.

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The New Plague: Vacant Jobs

The New Plague: Vacant Jobs

In tonight’s blog post, guest writer Edward Gordon shares the new plague taking hold in our economy: vacant jobs.

“Hiring Now” signs are sprouting across the United States. Businesses can’t fill the tidal wave of empty positions. Many are not new jobs but replacements for the unprecedented number of 79 million baby boomers retiring by 2030. The largest number reach age 65 in 2022. This will be a terrible year for recruiters.

As COVID-19 restrictions have eased, job openings have soared. Since October 2021, the number of vacant jobs reported in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic’s monthly JOLTS report has remained at about 11 million. The latest report shows that jobs openings are high in many key industry sectors including:

  1. Construction                                                   380,000
  2. Manufacturing                                                855,000
  3. Transportation, Warehousing & Utilities        479,000
  4. Professional & Business Services                   2,065,000
  5. Education & Health Services                          2,129,000
  6. Retail Trade                                                     1,046,000
  7. Accommodation & Food Services                  1,497,000
  8. State & Local Government                             567, 000

However, many businesses for proprietary reasons or because of repeated failure to find qualified candidates, do not report their job openings. As a result, we estimate the current number of vacant jobs at between 12 to 13 million vacant positions.

People are reentering the workforce, but many lack essential educational qualifications or specific job skills.  Too many Americans graduate from high school or even college without “learning how to learn” or failing to attain the math or literacy levels needed for employment in today’s in-demand career areas. Meanwhile technological advances across all industry sectors demand continuous education and training updates.

After assessing the current job situation, a Wall Street Journal analyst predicts, “If employment keeps growing like it has, by this summer the jobs market will either be extraordinarily tight, or excruciatingly so.” (March 5-6, 2022)

There is some evidence that American businesses have finally begun to increase their investments in worker training and education. But to produce more educated and skilled workers, systemic change is needed. If regional efforts do not grow appreciatively over the remaining decade, job vacancies will rise substantially. Our current analysis predicts that by 2030 there will be over 95 million empty positions globally with up to 30 million U.S. vacant jobs. The resulting economic and social upheaval will have dire consequences overseas and across America.

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Friday Filosophy v.03.18.22

Friday Filosophy v.03.18.22

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. born November 20, 1942) is an American politician who is the 46th and current president of the United States. Biden was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, moving with his family to New Castle County, Delaware, in 1953 when he was ten. He studied at the University of Delaware before earning his law degree from Syracuse University in 1968. He was elected to the New Castle County Council in 1970 and became the sixth-youngest senator in U.S. history after he was elected to the United States Senate from Delaware in 1972, at age 29. Biden was the chair or ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 12 years. He also chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1987 to 1995, dealing with drug policy, crime prevention, and civil liberties issues; led the effort to pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Violence Against Women Act; and oversaw six U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings, including the contentious hearings for Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 2008. Biden was reelected to the Senate six times and was the fourth-most senior sitting senator at the time when he became Obama’s vice president. During eight years as vice president, Biden leaned on his Senate experience and frequently represented the administration in negotiations with congressional Republicans. On foreign policy, Biden was a close counselor to the president and took a leading role in designing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011. In 2017, Obama awarded Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction.

Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris defeated incumbent president Donald Trump and vice president Mike Pence in the 2020 presidential election. He is the oldest president and the first to have a female vice president. His early presidential activity centered around proposing, lobbying for, and signing into law the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to help the United States recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing recession, as well as a series of executive orders.  

  • Folks, I can tell you I’ve known eight presidents, three of them intimately.
  • Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.
  • The greatest gift is the ability to forget – to forget the bad things and focus on the good.
  • In the good old days when I was a senator, I was my own man.
  • For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community.
  • When my first semester grades came out, my mom and dad told me I wouldn’t be playing football.
  • My dad used to have an expression – ‘It is the lucky person who gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they are about to do, and thinks it still matters.’
  • Reality has a way of intruding. Reality eventually intrudes on everything.
  • Foreign policy is like human relations, only people know less about each other.
  • In my heart, I’m confident I could make a good president.
  • Don’t hold against me that I don’t own – that I don’t own a single stock or bond. Don’t hold it – I have no savings accounts.
  • Well, I thought the deal was, when you went to work for the government you weren’t supposed to make money!
  • I’ve been really, really fortunate.
  • Most liberals think of civil liberties as their Achilles heel. It isn’t.
  • In this world, emotion has become suspect – the accepted style is smooth, antiseptic and passionless.
  • I know what I believe, I know what I want to do, and I’m just comfortable saying it, and laying it out there.
  • I consider myself to be as informed on American foreign policy as anyone in America.
  • You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, ‘Joey, the guy in Olyphant’s out of work, it’s an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law’s out of work, it’s a recession. When you’re out of work, it’s a depression.’
  • The American public’s a lot more sophisticated than we all give them credit for. And on complicated issues, I’m going to give them straight answers. And if it takes more than three minutes, I’m going to do it.

The Time is Now.

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Relationship Selling – How to Measure Sales Success

Relationship Selling – How to Measure Sales Success

Sales are a cornerstone in business. Guest writer Floyd Jerkins talks tonight about relationship selling, and how you can measure your sales success.

Would you run your business without looking at a financial statement? Crazy right? Do you know how many customers your sales team talks to every week? For many organizations, they don’t know the answer and are leaving thousands of dollars on the table for a competitor to get. This article outlines the process to create a measuring system.

A sales driven organization takes time, energy and the correct vision to have a highly competent team. Becoming effective in sales and marketing of your business requires an understanding of your customer base so you can focus the team on what matters the most.

In many business environments, there are typically four categories of customers that can be measured:

New Customer

This customer is one who has never been to or called or emailed your business before. They may call, email or come into your business from marketing and advertising efforts. This customer forms an impression of your business through every interaction they have. Every interaction. Not just the one where they drive up on your parking lot, but when they call into your business, what they see on Facebook or hear at the local restaurant from a group of customers. Every interaction creates an impression of your business.

Repeat Customer

This is a customer who has bought from you before. To a salesperson, this means that customer bought from them before. To the business, it means that customer purchased from the company previously. Many companies have “orphan owners.” These are customers who bought from a salesperson at your business but who is no longer there. These are typically a gold mine for new salespeople in companies with turnover in the sales department.

Referral Customer

This is a customer who was referred by another customer to your business or the salesperson. I apply the same sales “rules” to this category as I do for repeat customers. This is often an area that is highly underutilized by salespeople to generate revenue. When you have happy customers, they tell others about their experiences. When they tell someone else, and that customer calls or comes into the business, it is essential to train the customer to ask for the right salesperson.

New Business

This customer is one that you meet while at the gas station or a social event. A brief conversation in most any social situation generates new leads. One of the most natural ways to prospect for new business is to just talk to people you meet. It works like magic when done correctly.

For each of these categories, it’s important to know the sales mix in your business. Measure them monthly to determine how many sales were made in each of these categories and by each salesperson.

Relationship Selling Metrics

Let me start this segment by asking you three questions:

  1. Who do you make more money on, a repeat customer or a customer who has never done business with you or your company before?
  2. Who do you have the most fun working with, a repeat customer or someone who has never done with business with you before?
  3. Who do you sell in less time, someone who you don’t know or a customer who’s bought from you before?

Ok, I could ask ten more but let me just give you the answers. Repeat and referral business is where you make money and in less time. Time is money in sales, and by now in your career, someone’s told you that. So, learn how to develop this book of business to be a pro at sales.

Closing Ratios and Measuring Variables

There are many variables to discussing closing ratios for a salesperson and a sales team such as the type of product or service being sold, the customers buying cycles and personality type to name a few. If you only have twenty customers vs. a hundred or a thousand that makes a difference. So, even though there are variables, there are common points that every salesperson and team should be measured to increase their success and have some fun while doing it.

Do you have a CRM or other Sales Tracking System? Without a sales activity measurement system in place that consists of more than gross margin and sales volume, the ability to make improvements can many times escape even the best intentions. Integrating these systems into your sales and marketing teams are also challenging but required. If you don’t have one, get one.

How many people you talk to vs. how many you close is a crucial measurement in selling a product or service. Just like learning to shoot a free throw or how to stand in the batter’s box, it’s the basics of the profession. Time is an asset, and it must be used efficiently. Future articles will cover more metrics in detail.

What Does This Tell You?

  • If a salesperson talks to 6 people a day x 5 days a week, that’s 30 contacts. How many of those do they sell?
  • With a 20% closing ratio, they close 6. What happened to the other 24 contacts?

To effect change, you have to look deeper into what the salesperson’s activities and behaviors are between the time they first met the customer until the sales order is signed. To only look at the end of the sales cycle is like jumping in a lake before checking to see if there is enough water in it.

Read my article titled, “Relationship Selling – Steps to the Sale” because how the sale is processed can make a difference in how many deals are closed.

Sold Ratio to Face-to-Face Contacts

The average closing ratio of 20% should be the very minimum standard of sales performance. There should be a focused effort to increase this number regardless of your sales environment.

In a business that has 50% or more repeat customers a 20% closing rate is terrible and should be carefully examined because you are losing customers. With measurement, you learn how “effective” the salesperson or the sales team is and in what areas.

What if you measured 10 sales people and came up with the following scenario:

  • 10 salespeople x 6 customers per day x 5 days per week = 300 customers
  • At a 20% closing ratio would be 60 sold units.

Let’s say your Average Gross Profit (AGP) per unit is $500.00. Your goal is to increase the closing ratio by 5%. That would be an increase of 15 Units.

15 Units x $500.00 (AGP) equals $7,500.00 of additional profit.

What if?

What if you improved the closing ratio to 30%?• What if you improved AGP by 2%?• What if you improved the closing ratio by 5% and the AGP by 2%?

With just a little focus in the right areas, you can make more money and have more fun doing it. There are no shortcuts to sales success.

Process Improvement: Steps to Gaining More Efficiency in Closing Deals

To improve salespeople’s closing ratio involves coaching and counseling. Many times, the ratio’s can be improved by helping them become aware of their selling habits. Just like every person does, after we do things for a while, they become a habit. It doesn’t mean it’s good for us. I also know that many salespeople don’t have a dedicated sales manager whose job it is to help them improve. Professional salespeople take it upon themselves to measure and improve.

For a Salesperson, you could ask yourself the following types of questions:

  1. Am I walking the customer through the sales process and fully engaging them in each step?
  2. Am I prematurely asking for the order or have I properly built value then asked for the order?
  3. In the past 5 customer experiences, how many of them was I successful in taking them through the entire steps to the sale and closing the deal? For those that I was not successful, why, what happened, what could I have done differently?

For a Sales Manager, you could be asking your salespeople the following types of questions:

  1. What step in the sales cycle are you in? They should be able to describe clearly where they are and why. If they can’t, they need some coaching.
  2. Since you’ve priced the customer, what are the top three reasons they want to buy that product and buy it from us? If they can’t tell you it’s because they have not asked during step #2 of the sales process.
  3. If the customer walked after you gave them a price, what were the customer’s reasons for leaving? Make sure you get what the customer said, not what the salesperson heard.

5 More Tips & Suggestions:

  1. An old-time rule of sales is that you have to talk to a lot of people to make money in sales. The new rule to add to that is you want to be super productive with each interaction. Time is money. You don’t want to waste your time or your customers. Learn the sales process and use it as many times as you can so you can make more money in less time.
  2. Make sure to measure your key behaviors accurately. Measure it the same way for a while to accurately assess before deciding on an improvement plan.
  3. Businesses that log these customer contacts for every interaction outperform those that do not. You wouldn’t run your business without a financial statement, so don’t run it without knowing the sales teams key performance indicators. Tracking the key selling behaviors is a performance statement for the salesperson or sales team that allows you to create improvement plans.
  4. Knowing the “steps to the sale” allows a salesperson to gauge where they are at in the sales process. By using the process, you build the value of your product and your business by knowing when to insert key value added solutions that your business or product offers.
  5. It is very common for a customer to ask the first question when they meet a salesperson. That question can be “how much is it?” When you first meet the customer make sure you qualify their wants and needs before pricing your product.

Moving a customer through the sales process naturally creates closes. Improving your closing ratio doesn’t add cost to the sale. It can be as easy as learning how to communicate better. In future articles, I’ll address other key metrics to measure and how to improve your effectiveness.

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Equipment Sales in the “On Demand” Age

Equipment Sales in the ‘On Demand’ Age

Guest writer Alex Kraft Started as an equipment salesperson for Flagler Construction Equipment (Volvo heavy dealer in Florida) in 2004. Tonight he brings his expertise here on the topic of managing equipment sales in the “on demand” age.

Selling equipment used to be so easy. Or that’s what I thought when I listened to the old timers tell me stories of taking a customer out and signing a “million-dollar order on a cocktail napkin”.  Then that damn internet came along and ruined everything! Truth is buyer behavior has changed. According to a recent McKinsey B2B study, there’s been an 85% increase in the preference for buyers to conduct online research, and a 238% increase in buyer preference for self-serve looking for information on the companies’ website.

The evolution of the sales profession is not just impacting the equipment world. There is a larger societal shift at play. For example, when I was younger, my perception of a salesperson was the Alec Baldwin character from the ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ film.  Baldwin’s character berates a sales team with his hard charging, second place is for losers’ mentality (in the movie 2nd place gets a set of steak knives!).  Success was the result of those who simply ‘do not take no for an answer’.  Today’s sales culture is much different. Training materials focus on skills such as listening, empathy, and personalizing a solution.  I read a blog post today which mentioned the importance of understanding your prospect’s needs and not lumping all potential customers into the same broad category. I’d love to take a trip back with a time machine to see the Baldwin character’s face when someone mentions “empathy” as a key to closing deals!

What does that mean for equipment salespeople?  First, it does NOT mean that salespeople are less valuable or that they will be unnecessary. To me, the job has changed. Customers aren’t basing their decisions anymore on who takes them to Ruth’s Chris or lunch twice a week. The most important trait for a successful equipment salesperson is responsiveness. What separates the best salespeople from the average is what they do AFTER the sale. Those that take ownership of issues that arise and solve problems are the salespeople that foster loyalty.

The best comparison I can make is to the medical sales industry. If anyone knows someone in the medical sales industry, you’ll know that a medical ‘salesperson’ typically doesn’t handle pricing. Instead, they focus on managing ‘cases’ or supporting the doctor’s usage of the products. Another industry that we can draw from is real estate.  Everyone is a real estate expert today due to the unprecedented accessibility of information, but there have never been more registered real estate agents. Despite this dynamic, an agent that helps a buyer through every step of the process is worth every penny.

Since more customers perform online research, they are more educated on the products than ever before. There are fewer unique brand features that a salesperson can point out to a potential buyer. One area that I see a huge opportunity for salespeople to take advantage of is the focus on telematics data. Every OEM/dealer is touting their telematics data capability and the amount of information available. The problem becomes who’s going to read through all that data? Great salespeople are ‘advisors’ for their customers, and what better opportunity to be an advisor than to use the data available on your customer’s machines to provide valuable insight on how they operate their fleet. How powerful could it be for a salesperson to come to their customer, with 3-5 observations on their fleet performance for a specific job? Do you notice certain operators that can benefit from additional training? Are there potential looming issues on machines due to fault codes? Another area that customers seem to struggle with is when to dispose of a machine.  Great salespeople know the market (like real estate agents) and could utilize their network to help customers maximize value for machines as they reach the end of their life cycle, so customers don’t always have to send machines to auction.

In summary, what do all customers seek from their vendor relationships? Value and support. As I’ve outlined above, customers’ definition of value has changed, so it’s time for dealers’ expectations for salespeople to adjust as well. That begins with redefining what a salesperson profile is. Some of the best equipment salespeople that I’ve ever seen were former mechanics.  Their technical aptitude became a huge asset for their customers, as they could help troubleshoot issues, relay information to their service department, and in a pinch even turn a wrench themselves. Salespeople who continue operating with the belief that their job is solely to quote pricing, buy lunch, and push all other duties to another department will become very replaceable, very quickly.

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Friday Filosophy v.03.11.2022

Friday Filosophy v.03.11.2022

Henry “Henny” Youngman (16 March 1906 – 24 February 1998) was an American comedian and musician famous for his mastery of the “one-liner“, his best-known one-liner undoubtedly being “Take my wife… please”.

In a time when many comedians told elaborate anecdotes, Youngman’s routine consisted of telling simple one-liner jokes, occasionally with interludes of violin playing. These depicted simple, cartoon-like situations, eliminating lengthy build-ups and going straight to the punch line. Known as “the King of the One-Liners”, a title conferred to him by columnist Walter Winchell, a stage performance by Youngman lasted only 15 to 20 minutes but contained dozens of jokes in rapid succession.

  • If you’re going to do something tonight that you’ll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.
  • Some people ask the secret of our long marriage. We take time to go to a restaurant two times a week. A little candlelight, dinner, soft music and dancing. She goes Tuesdays, I go Fridays.
  • I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back.
  • I’ve been in love with the same woman for forty-one years. If my wife finds out, she’ll kill me.
  • My wife dresses to kill. She cooks the same way.
  • My son complains about headaches. I tell him all the time, when you get out of bed, it’s feet first!
  • My brother was a lifeguard in a car wash.
  • This is an elegant hotel! Room service has an unlisted number.
  • You have a ready wit. Tell me when it’s ready.
  • If you had your life to live over again, do it overseas.
  • That was the first time I saw a horse start from a kneeling position!
  • Just got back from a pleasure trip: I took my mother-in-law to the airport.
  • I played a lot of tough clubs in my time. Once a guy in one of those clubs wanted to bet me $10 that I was dead. I was afraid to bet.
  • How to drive a guy crazy: send him a telegram and on the top put ‘page 2.’
  • Take my wife… Please!

The Time is Now.

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The Great Reshuffle: How to Retain Top Talent

The Great Reshuffle: How to Retain Top Talent

Guest writer Sonya Law tackles on of the challenges facing businesses today: how to retain your top talent in the face of what is being called the great reshuffle.

The great resignation: could it best be described as the great reshuffle?

It’s true that there has always been staff turnover, so the great resignation is not new, however the reasons for leaving and staying are!

So how do we retain our talent?

  1. Career discussions: We need to be proactive in talking with employees, to discuss their career aspirations or a recruiter will have this conversation for you!
  2. Training: Employees want to learn and grow.  Be prepared to invest in their personal and professional development and ask them an open question: What do you CARE about?
  3. Purpose & EVP: They want clarity on the purpose of the company and align themselves with it. We need to know what our company’s Employee Value Proposition is in order to attract and retain staff, furthermore, we need to believe it and articulate it with authenticity. Ask yourself the question: What do you CARE about?
  4. Empathy: Employees want a manager that CARES for their wellbeing. We need to have a holistic approach to the wellness of employees, both physically and mentally. This will require a budget for the investment into structured wellness programs that detects, monitor and support the wellbeing of staff. What is your financial investment into employee wellbeing?
  5. Leadership: Hiring and educating our mid-level (branch) managers – we know the top reason that employees leave is because of their manager. We need to hire managers who have good leadership skills and educate our existing managers on how to evolve and become better leaders. When was the last time you engaged in leadership training or coaching?
  6. Value: Visibility of leadership and valuing its people is critical in retaining talent, it is also having the conversation with a resigning employee, to ask the reasons why they are leaving and to ask them to stay. Try to keep them!

We are only as good as our people and our team without our employees we do not have a business.  It’s important we understand as HR and Leaders, what are the roadblocks in our businesses and where do our employees need support.  Its having a difficult conversation about an employment contract that needs to be sorted, so that we can get on with business.  All too often we get sidetracked on what it is we think we should do, what leaders DO is focus on the right things.

When, we are put in a position of leadership it is to serve, it is to understand what is needed to get business done and achieve our goals together as a team.  Gone are the days where apathy is a defense or I don’t like conflict is used as an excuse for not having uncomfortable but necessary conversations.

As leaders we need to be addressing issues and people who don’t fit or risk losing talent.

Post Pandemic, employees are looking for:

  • Autonomy about when and where they work.
  • Flexibility to do LIFE, to spend time with their partners, family, pet’s and be connected to the community in which they live.
  • Clarity on what is their passion, what gives them joy, fulfillment and align their life with it. This is the new work life, do LIFE balance!

The entrepreneurial life:

The most interesting reason, that employees are leaving is to pursue their own start up’s, creating businesses that align with their passion and are becoming entrepreneurs.

  • Forbes reported statistics that in the US, new business applications are up 95% according to the Census Bureau.
  • France is up 20% according to McKinsey.
  • Japan is up 14%, in the UK are up 30% according to National Statistical Office.

Jobs in most demand are seeing increases in salaries of up to 30-40%:

The great reshuffle has also pushed up wages because of the lack of supply of seasonal labour and good candidates, due to a candidate short market.

The industries most affected and experiencing this great re-shuffle and increase in salaries are:

  • Human Resources
  • Information technology
  • Accountancy, Legal and Finance.

Compliance is a constraint on time:

The biggest roadblock HR and leaders are facing in retaining its talent is the constraints on time to invest in these initiatives, so much of the role is about compliance due to Pandemic and Vaccinations.

We know though that if we take proactive and positive steps to engage with our employees our businesses will thrive!

“Take the time to look after your people and they will take time to look after your business.”

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Training Develops Skills That Can Be Measured

Training develops skills that can be measured.

Guest writer Natalia Dmitrenko continues to build from the foundation of last week’s blog post, “Loyal Staff” with her exploration of the skills that training develops. Each of these skills can be measured.

Any corporate training initiatives have a similar purpose: evaluation of the difference in the performance of staff before and after the training took place. That way the company gets a much better picture of all the benefits or potential drawbacks which come with any L&D training.

But if you’d look at the other side of the coin, you’d see that developing effective training mechanisms that would provide up-to-date data about the gaps in knowledge and skills within the departments can be time consuming and rather costly.

Good news is that collaboration with e-learning platforms doesn’t mean companies have to invest tons of funds in training since there are already-made training solutions available. Luckily there are some tools that provide good assistance for these kinds of compliance training. One is Grinfer for Business that offers a training platform that takes the stress out of learning. Participants can log in from anywhere and on-the-go because it’s incredibly mobile. Person can watch one course or even a lesson per day and he/she is done. It’s almost like checking your Instagram, but more informative and career related.

Grinfer for Business is not only about the value-adding L&D activities but is also about performance metrics which can be now implemented easier, thanks to online technologies. This e-learning solution effectively builds a continuous cycle of learning with easy access on-demand not just to career related courses but also to a wide library of content for “your body and soul”. Or, in other words, things that are fun to learn in your spare time.

Business teams get instant access to free live webinars and masterclasses on any topic from top instructors, 1,200+ online courses, workshops, access to authors’ blogs, personalized learning paths/curriculum, and much more. Here learning is not a part of the job, it is mixed with enjoyment of learning something new about the stuff that you love to do outside of your job.

An experience shows that whenever a company builds a continuous cycle of learning, this will not only contribute to a corporate culture across the SME. It also adds a competitive edge that encourages staff in a good way to become more productive and efficient. However, everything really depends on the type of company’s training initiative.

For example, a good showcase of such team training would be collaboration in 2021 with a middle-sized IT company called Severex. Initially, this company’s goal was to find a highly efficient e-learning solution that would work well for upskilling company’s work teams with on-demand skills upgrades, rapid upskilling, and reskilling.

Since Grinfer for Business also engages teams by continuously measuring students’ progress/learning outcomes, after about 3 months of training, Grinfer has collected feedback from the Severex learning teams about their personal learning experiences, insights, achievements, success stories, and any drawbacks that they’ve faced along the way. The survey responses indicated that learning paths correlated with employee engagement which boosted productivity and the effectiveness of teams.

At the same time, this training initiative has built a stronger team spirit and contributed to maintaining a healthy corporate culture across the business. Severex employees, who took part in team learning, have admitted that the learning experience positively influenced their overall job satisfaction. And that most of them felt like the company does a good job in taking care of their needs.

Many respondents admitted that most upgrades they received on hard and soft skills were useful and helped them find new creative outlets for scaling and accomplishing set goals more effectively. By the end of the training cycle, the overall productivity of Severex staff had ticked up to about 15%. At the same time, interaction with the Grinfer for Business platform has ramped up showing the increase of 30%.

In addition, Severex’s HRs were provided with enough data (accumulated from the Grinfer’s custom reports and learners’ engagement rates) for finding better ways to develop long-term learning paths that wouldn’t demand costly investments. And, at the same time, would increase the absorption rate, break the daily routine, and boost employees’ loyalty.

Taking into account that retention rates and employees’ loyalty to a place of hire are the two pressing issues (since the cost of employee turnovers can be high), this puts L&D training programs in a high priority list of organizational charts. And if a company’s staff is filled with people who are always up for learning – always is a good sign.

Coping with today’s already accepted “new normals”, companies start to realize that using e-learning platforms for corporate training provide many undoubtful benefits due to its incredible flexibility, mobility, and accessibility. Some companies go for external e-learning resources like LMS or eLearning marketplaces that are available now for both, individual and group training sessions.

Some prefer to stick to blended learning, which could be the best choice too since it’s also highly effective and also less costly. And saving money is what most companies want in the current realities caused by the global pandemic.

Corporate training delivered via e-learning platforms may still raise some contradictions. The main concern is that you can motivate employees with proper training and you can kill your employees’ motivation with improper ways of training. However, with the rapidly growing popularity of the eLearning industry, investing time, money, and efforts into adequate online educational resources is one of the smartest decisions that business teams can come up with today.

Find more info on how we can help at Grinfer website.

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Friday Filosophy v.03.04.2022

Friday Filosophy v.03.04.2022

Mother Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu – 26 August 1910 – 5 September 1997, honoured in the Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, was an Albanian–Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary. She was born in Skopje (now the capital of North Macedonia), then part of the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. After living in Skopje for eighteen years, she moved to Ireland and then to India, where she lived for most of her life.

In 1950, Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic religious congregation that had over 4,500 nuns and was active in 133 countries as of 2012. The congregation manages homes for people who are dying of HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis. It also runs soup kitchens, dispensaries, mobile clinics, children’s and family counselling programmes, as well as orphanages and schools. Members take vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, and also profess a fourth vow – to give “wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor.”

Teresa received a number of honors, including the 1962 Ramon Magsaysay Peace Prize and the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. She was canonized on 4 September 2016, and the anniversary of her death (5 September) is her feast day. A controversial figure during her life and after her death, Teresa was admired by many for her charitable work. She was praised and criticized on various counts, such as for her views on abortion and contraception, and was criticized for poor conditions in her houses for the dying. Her authorized biography was written by Navin Chawla and published in 1992, and she has been the subject of films and other books. On 6 September 2017, Teresa and St. Francis Xavier were named co-patrons of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Calcutta.

  • Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
  • There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.
  • Be gentle to all and stern with yourself.
  • Accustom yourself continually to make many acts of love, for they enkindle and melt the soul.
  • To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.
  • I know the power obedience has of making things easy which seem impossible.
  • God gave us faculties for our use; each of them will receive its proper reward. Then do not let us try to charm them to sleep, but permit them to do their work until divinely called to something higher.
  • Our body has this defect that, the more it is provided care and comforts, the more needs and desires it finds.
  • It is no small misfortune and disgrace that, through our own fault, we neither understand our nature nor our origin.

The Time is Now.

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Loyal Staff: Does Corporate Training Really Work Well for Uplifting Employees’ Skills and Boosting Loyalty?

Loyal Staff: Does Corporate Training Really Work Well for Uplifting Employees’ Skills and Boosting Loyalty?

We are pleased to introduce another new guest writer here at Learning Without Scars. Natallia Dmitrenko is a content specialist at Grinfer with a focus on content management and blog promotion. She gained experience studying at the University of Nebraska taking graduate-level classes and working for a number of companies based in the US and in Minsk, Belarus. Tonight, she writes about loyal staff, and asks the question that many of our clients have asked: does corporate training really work well for uplifting employees’ skills and boosting loyalty?

What is one of the most expensive mistakes managerial staff makes? The answer is: unsuccessful hires. Indeed, statistics indicate that a wrong hire can cost three to five times the compensation of the candidate.  On the other hand, according to Go2HR (one of the most trusted sources on HR): “40% of employees who receive poor job training leave their positions within the first year.” Lack of loyalty among employees?

So, how to stave people off from leaving in the first year of hire? No wonder why HRs spend a big chunk of time figuring out best ways of improving training programs for staff. In fact, an engaging corporate L&D training program can become an effective solution for boosting retention and reaching business goals.

Today, L&D online training programs have become a dynamic and almost inseparable part of any business venture. In 2022, almost 50% of L&D professionals confirmed that those employees who were engaged in corporate training were highly engaged in overall corporate processes as well. Hence, being aware of all the popular/efficient trends in the world of L&D is essential for the effective management of staff. Well, especially in the current COVID-19 realities.

Indeed, there are two types of L&D training that exist today: on-the-job training and online training. If the question arises what kind of training to give, this depends upon a multiple of factors: overall productivity and work experience of employees, particular types of hurdles faced at work, the recent work performance, etc. However, the rising tension caused by the never-ending COVID-19 epidemic is forcing companies to pay more attention to L&D training offered via the Internet. Many have already admitted that it really works!

New “work from home” practices prove that if companies engage employees into online training programs, they won’t bet on the wrong horse. Some of the main positive impacts of taking classes on e-learning platforms are:

  • E-learning boosts cooperation by enhancing such soft skills as leadership and communication. As employees work and interact in these training sessions, which helps to build stronger interpersonal soft skills, reliance, and support which ultimately leads to better cooperation.
  • The main advantage of e-learning is in its ability to convert staff into a skilled workforce while providing instant access to learning resources. And then the upskilled workforce can turn complex scenes to opportunities in more effective client-centric ways.
  • Effective online programs open more opportunities to employees to apply new skills in response to potential job challenges.
  • Less supervision required if the employees are trained well. If employees’ liability is amplified resulting from the effective online training program, more man hours can be put to good use. Plus, staff will be more worked up to take on challenging tasks at hand in the future.
  • An effective corporate training program delivered online instills values of learning, evokes creativity in staff, improves decision making skills, breaks the ice and contributes to interacting more openly. Hence, an increased self-esteem motivates employees to work better and develop a stronger sense of loyalty to a place of employment. And that’s just like having a healthy fruit in the diet – the bigger employees’ loyalty, the more companies benefit from the positive corporate culture.

Of course, corporate training programs vary depending on the company. For example, a company that lays concrete for warehouses odds are will probably need a different training program compared to a tech software company.  Still, engaging workers in online training builds a progressive company’s image, foster loyalty, and boost retention rates. Plus, a good online training program also makes any company look more progressive therefore, more attractive to new recruits.

Obviously, staff upskilling through e-learning helps employees understand their jobs and company’s policies better. Proper training contributes to higher retention rates, greater job satisfaction and, as a result, increases loyalty of staff. People feel like they work in an inclusive atmosphere where everyone feels like they can contribute. And this is a part of the retention secret sauce.

Job satisfaction is a necessary ingredient for efficient and enthusiastic job behavior of staff. And that’s the case when a proper corporate training really adds to that dish and brings the whole meal together.

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