Getting good quality staff might be difficult but enhancing the skills of your existing staff is not. Many leading IFAs have already started investing in the training and development of their staff and have seen amazing results.
Here are a few tips on how you can improve the aptitude and attitude of your work force.
Soft Skills Training:
According to Vinod Jain of Jain Investments, your employees are the face of your business and they are ones who stay in constant touch with your clients. Therefore, it is important to ensure they have good communication skills. “Your clients are going to evaluate the quality of service of your firm based on their interaction with your staff. They are the face and voice of your firm, it is imperative they are given the required skills to maintain the image of your firm.”
In fact, most firms have made it mandatory for all their staff to go through a soft skills training during their orientation.
Technical Training:
Kartik Jhaveri of Transcend Consulting feels that technical training such as tax planning, estate planning and financial planning through excel is the need of the hour, “Today’s education system, while helping students gain impressive qualifications, fails to equip them with important industry based know-how. This is the reason we give continuous training to our new recruits. This helps them understand what the client’s demands are. Also, I find, post training, employees are better equipped to handle clients.”
Though Kartik has not integrated a training module in his HR policy, he has started taking conscious steps to increase the technical skills of his staff.
Behavioural Workshops:
A few firms have started conducting workshops on investor behaviour and psychology to help their employees understand how they must approach clients and deal with them.
Vinod Jain feels that helping employees understand investor behaviour is the key to growing advisory business. “We conduct weekly training sessions for all our employees. In these sessions, we concentrate on developing a better understanding of investor psychology. This helps them make their clients aware of avoiding investing pitfalls. “
He adds, “I find that by increasing the skillset of my staff, they were able to bring in and retain many clients. This is why we training is an integral part of our HR policy for the past 16 years.”
Motivational Seminars:
Nikhil Naik of Naikwealth Planners attributes all his success to continuous training. While Nikhil gives various types of training to his employees, he feels attending motivational seminars stimulate people to perform better.
“Better people make better employees and better employees create better clients,” he says.
Learning and development:
Nikhil also encourages his staff to pursue higher educations and is happy to refund the fees on successful completion. “My staff have attended courses in FLAME, Symbiosis, and other universities. Most of my employees stay on with us, because they see scope for developing not just as a professional but also as an individual.”
Nikhil feels that proper training can fix anything. “When I started, I too was ill equipped to face the industry but everyone has to start somewhere. While selecting my staff the only thing I see is whether they can adjust to our work culture,” he says.
