Page 42 - foodservice magazine September 2018

A
42
MANAGEMENT
A WINNING FORMULA
TONY ELDRED SHARES HOW TRAINING STAFF IS AN INVESTMENT AND WILL HELP MAXIMISE YOUR BUSINESS SUCCESS.
TONY ELDRED
FOOD SERVICE
Tony Eldred operates Eldred Hospitality Pty Ltd, ‘The Hospitality Specialists’.
Contact him on (03) 9813 3311 or at eldtrain.com.au.
Some of you who have been reading this column for years may think of me as
purely a management consultant – an occupation described by one wit as “somebody who knows 4,000 ways to make love but doesn’t have a girlfriend”. That description has a ring of truth about it for most consultants, who work alone, with no
infrastructure around them. Fortunately, I have passed well beyond that and now have a sizeable business, employing
a number of highly experienced, specialist staff and support personnel.
The largest portion of my business is not consulting,
but the provision of short training courses to key industry staff. Currently, we train about
800 people a year via two and three-day career development courses. After 31 years doing this I have some observations about effective training that you may find helpful.
The first issue I’d like to highlight is that training is not a universal cure-all for all your business problems. On one hand, it can be incredibly beneficial and cost effective if it is approached the right way and diligently followed-up; on the other hand, I would like a small portion of the money wasted on ill-considered or badly conducted training in Australia – that would be a huge number.
We still get many people rolling-up to training courses without any idea why they have been sent, or what is expected of them during and after the course. It seems like many business owners have the unreal expectation that simply attending a training course will change the behaviour or skill level of their staff. In reality, this is highly unlikely. Instead of a magical change in performance, the business owner pays a large amount of money to provide two entertaining days off work, with no net gain to the business.
On the other hand, we have clients who go through a thorough process that starts with sitting down with the staff member being trained and briefing them on why they are being sent to training and what is expected of them – before, during and after the actual training course. They are informed that mastering the main subject matter of this and other specific training is a pre-requisite for any advancement or promotion. They won’t get the better title
N
G
N
M
E
E
M
T
A