Do Your Spa Employees Need Refreshing?
By 2018 the spa industry is projected to grow by 40%. A new regime of employees with fresh skills and talents, but not necessarily experience will enter the workforce. Meanwhile many existing employees struggle with the initial skills they learned from school or knowledge gleaned from product training.
Is refresher training for employees overrated? Hakeem Adebiyi of V-Creative says there is a school of thought out there that doesn’t see the value of teaching employees concepts they have already been introduced to. There is a lot of value in the refresher course though. For starters, here are two benefits of the refresher course.
1) To Keep Pace With Market Trends
Business is changing all the time. The ideas that worked last year may not be relevant this year. More likely than that though, the ideas that worked last year might need to be tweaked a little bit. Paradigms change. A new competitor has entered the marketplace. An old rival has left the marketplace. Refreshing training allows businesses to infuse old concepts with new information, which will give employees the knowledge they need to help the company grow.
2) People Forget Sometimes
Online employee training is a good investment. It has been proven that virtual training sessions teach people valuable information they will use to make their company better. However, even the most diligent employee, even the most earnest worker, doesn’t remember everything that was presented in a training session. People’s brains just don’t work like that. Nevertheless, science has proven that people do remember information better if it is presented multiple times. A quick refresher course, three or six months down the line, will help your employees soak up more information than you thought possible.
Why Don’t More Spas Do Refresher Courses?
If refresher courses are so great, then why would a business forgo it? Well, there are a couple of reasons for that. One problem is that many businesses still rely on traditional employee training. That means they have to rent out a conference room, hire an instructor, print out physical materials, and coordinate the entire event. It is a lot of work. It is also cost-prohibitive. Some businesses find it untenable, and they avoid training when they can.
Traditional methods of teaching and tuition such as classroom-based courses or one-on-one office tutorials aren’t exactly relevant, appropriate or effective anymore. Studies into how we acquire and retain information have found that our brains do not react well to this passive style of training.
But if you introduce interactive training that is linked to your employees’ professional objectives and personal development, they will feel empowered to work harder and stay with the company.
As famous motivational speaker Zig Ziglar said, “The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is to not train them and keep them.”
Do you agree?
Linda Harding-Bond
