Staying power - Westfair Communications

Danbury”™s Cartus Corp. was the lone Fairfield County-based company to make this year”™s “Training 125” list, published annually by Training Magazine to recognize innovators in the field.

The magazine recognized Cartus for training employees in aspects of corporate controls spawned by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Also making the list was MetLife, whose Barnum Financial Group affiliate is the largest financial planning agency in Fairfield County.

Both companies have factored into their training regimens the fact that they experience significant turnover in segments of their employee populations.

Retention efforts

So-called early tenure turnover, in which employees abandon jobs after less than a year, is up, according to a survey by TalentKeepers, a Maitland, Fla., company that consults on employee retention. Its surveys show that of workers who quit their jobs, six in 10 do so within the first year of employment at an organization.

At Barnum Financial Group, which claims a retention rate triple that of the average in the financial services industry, new employees receive a two-week training session and average five to seven hours of training weekly in their first year.

“I think that retention ”¦ is the major issue, especially (with) our field force,” said Mike LoPresti, who leads training programs at Barnum Financial Group, a Shelton-based affiliate of MetLife. “It is a hell of a lot ”¦ but we tell people that if you don”™t take advantage of all the stuff we do here, we are just another company.”

Some 500 of Cartus”™ 2,800 employees are in-house consultants who work directly with employees undertaking a move. It is a stressful position that in the past has led to high turnover, and in the past year Cartus has adjusted its training practices in an attempt to stem defections.

At the outset of their employment, front-line employees no longer swallow a massive amount of information from a fire hose, instead sipping from a more modular-based curriculum matched to the challenges they are currently facing.

The new sequential program is not unlike what senior executives receive, passing through four stages as they progress up the company”™s career ladder.

“We were spending a tremendous amount on people who were not staying long enough,” said Lynette Wagner, director of Cartus”™ 35-person global training and development department, which has a $2.2 million budget according to Training Magazine.

Showing impact

Cartus is now developing a training program to help employees qualify for lateral transfers within the company. The implementation of such a program landed Verizon Wireless the No. 4 slot on the Training 125 list.

The Ritz Carlton Hotel Co., which is building a hotel in White Plains, N.Y., topped the list, recognized for its efficiency in training employees to use a computer system called Mystique that makes it easy to call guests prior to arrival. The company estimates it generated $525,000 in additional revenue after installing the system in 2005, and the hotelier is now expanding use of the system.

If corporate training programs have a common failing, it is that they focus too much on putting together massive catalogs of training courses, instead of focusing a limited amount of training for maximum effect on the bottom line.

“A catalog approach shows activity, but it does not show impact,” Wagner said. “One of the worst habits (training departments) get into is the ”˜butts in seats”™ report, in which they talk about how they ran six courses that 92 people attended.

“The first thing to do would be to meet with the business leaders ”“ and not go in with the leading question of ”˜What are your training needs?”™” Wagner said. “Go in and talk about what is happening in (the) business, what are (the) goals? Take it from a ”¦ consulting perspective.”