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Training – An investment set to transform your business

Written by John Ivey Director, Fusion Knowledge Services
Training – An investment set to transform your business

“The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave, is not training them and having them stay.”

-    Henry Ford, Founder, Ford Motor Company

The financial landscape is shifting at a rapid rate, barely recognizable from half a decade to the next, so naturally, many banks are forced to update their systems to remain on top of the changing tides. Are your employees enabled to use these new systems optimally?

Sometimes it is forgotten that the center of all businesses is commonly the employees themselves, those that run and understand the software and should therefore keep up-to-date with the changing technology. It’s time to invest in employee training.

The true value of training

The way to truly unlock the full potential of your systems is to ensure that your employees are trained to use them correctly, efficiently and productively. You wouldn’t build furniture without the instruction manual, so why leave your people without the depth of knowledge they need to successfully employ new and developing systems?

There are four key benefits of training, the first being the reduction of operational errors, saving time and money that these errors can often leach. When people know how to do things properly, things run a lot smoother and more efficiently.

Employee engagement is powerful. The Gallup Market Survey of 2019 states that “Highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability.” By training effectively, you can promote employee engagement by ensuring that they feel confident and knowledgeable within their role by learning how to correctly and successfully utilize banking systems to the best of their ability.

Training employees also makes the onboarding process smoother. With a set training plan and process in place, your people know exactly what they must go through to become a fully-fledged member of the team, with all the knowledge they need to thrive in their new position. Furthermore, it’s not just new employees that can benefit from training programs; having a process in place can also make it easier for employees to seamlessly adapt to change, regardless of how new technologies transform the processes and systems that they’re used to.

Training, but effectively

The key word is effective. It’s one thing to put plans in place to train employees, but training is useless if it’s not effective. Effective training promotes efficiency, employee engagement and places organizations in a better space to realize return on investment.

What is effective training? One thing that people often forget is that people learn in different ways. The popular VARK model highlights that there are four key learning styles – Visual, Auditory, Read/Write and Kinesthetic. Effective training not only recognizes that these exist, but is flexible to adapt, to cater to each team member, ensuring that they get the most out of their training and genuinely learn from it, and retain the knowledge gained.

Beyond style, the content of training is at the core of the program. For this reason, it’s essential to provide information that is loaded with expert knowledge, that comes from people and sources that really know what they’re talking about. HR Zone highlighted that training “improves employee satisfaction and motivation, and consequently staff retention” when people know what they’re doing. It leaves them empowered and confident in their role, making them more inclined to stay in it.

So, why train employees?

Essentially, when it comes to introducing, upgrading or even just maintaining systems, it’s vital that your employees feel confident in their knowledge of the systems themselves and how to utilize them to the best of their ability. Even just knowing and understanding the functionalities that systems are capable of, can enhance the technology and allow it to reach its full potential. Training employees effectively accelerates agility, efficiency and productivity.

At Finastra, we believe in the power of effective training, which is why we created Fusion Knowledge Services - a set of training programs that underpin each Finastra solution. Find out more about Fusion Knowledge Services on our training site or take a look at our other services packages supporting our solutions.

This article previously appeared on Bobsguide here.

Written by
John Ivey

John Ivey

Director, Fusion Knowledge Services

As Director of Fusion Knowledge Services, John has overall responsibility for customer, partner and employee enablement. John joined Finastra (formerly D+H) in August 2011 as a Training Manager for Retail Banking. In 2017, he was promoted to Director of Training for the Americas Community Markets...

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