In an industry involving drilling, concrete sawing and demolition, safety has to be one of the top considerations. Poor training can lead to accidents that not only result in workers being injured, but they can hit the company hard if its operations are interrupted.
Clyde Valley Drilling in Carstairs, Lanarkshire, employs 70 staff carrying our diamond drilling, diamond concrete sawing and concrete cutting to businesses across Scotland and the north of England.
Like the bosses of many smaller companies, Owen Barrett, the managing director, was interested in training and health and safety, but was worried about the cost.
Training has to be paid for, and while 50 per cent of the cost could be subsidised by Scottish Enterprise, Barrett still had to provide the other 50 per cent. On top of that, he had to find and pay for a venue, and pay wages to staff who were training rather than at work. “It meant,” he said, “that any subsidy only actually covered about 25 per cent of the cost.”
Through his local council and Scottish Enterprise, Barrett was introduced to Gill Blair, a learndirect scotland for business training partner, who assessed the company’s training needs. She was then able to identify training gaps and prioritise what needed to be done.
“We’d never had a plan for training,” said Barrett, “but Gill helped us draw one up and put it into practice and it’s been so successful that we now have a plan for the next three years.”
Blair suggested the kind of training needed to address each skills gap – external, internal or online – and introduced Barrett to the courses available.
“The range of courses was massive,” he said, “and it meant, also, that our employees could choose how they wanted to learn and when, so we could be really flexible and not interrupt our workflow.”
The company employs staff with a wide range of skills so the training programme had to be flexible enough to accommodate this. On the front line, there are three contract managers who have supervisor support to provide on site survey, technical support and quotations. On top of that there is a team carrying out drilling and specialist demolition work.
As part of the strategy, Blair trained two managers and a supervisor up to National Vocational Qualification level so that they could train the rest of the staff internally without having to bring anyone else in to do it, thus saving the company money.
At the same time the company did some soft skills training for its admin staff – communication, time management, decision making, telephone skills among others – and found that these employees, like those working on drilling, sawing or demolition, were far more motivated and productive.
The results have been impressive with morale, productivity and turnover rocketing, while repair bills have dropped.
“Our turnover has increased from £1 million to £3 million in just three years,” said Barrett, “and we’re handling that increased amount of business with the same number of admin staff because of their improved IT skills.
“Our repair bill has also fallen by £1000 a month because our staff have been trained to maintain their equipment properly.
“I realise now that training doesn’t cost money,” he added. “It saves money and then actually makes money.”
Training has helped the company to be so successful that they recently moved into new purpose-built premises at Eurocentral near Bellshill.
Clyde Valley Drilling is planning to increase its staff to more than 100. Barrett recognises that learning and development have been central to the growth of the company, so one quarter of the floor space of the new building is to be dedicated to training.