Training, productivity and performance: lessons from a chilean retailer

Date07 March 2020
Published date07 March 2020
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-12-2019-0088
Pages75-79
AuthorJane Rexworthy
Subject MatterHR & organizational behaviour,Employee behaviour
Training, productivity and performance:
lessons from a chilean retailer
Jane Rexworthy
Abstract
Purpose A project to improve productivity in one of the largest retail firms in Latin America
demonstrateshow a tailor-made training intervention can improveworkers’ performance and how — and
by how much— investing in soft-skills can leadto productivity gains.
Design/methodology/approach Individual-levellongitudinal informationgathered from the firm.
Findings The training interventionwas shown to have a positive and significant effect on both store-
level sales and transactions per worker. This result was confirmed by a cost/benefit analysis. This
provides clear evidence that productivity can be boosted with a high quality, well-designed and
optimally-delivered training programme targeted to increase socio-emotional skills. This assertion has
been corroborated by an empirical analysis of the project carried out by specialists from the Inter-
AmericanDevelopment Bank and the Department of Economics,University of Maryland.
Originality/value The project is one of the firstto be subject to a detailed analysis to provide evidence
of the causalimpact of training on direct productivitymeasures.
Keywords Employee engagement, Culture change, Communications, Training and development,
Productivity, skills, Leadership training, Culture
Paper type Case study
Training, productivity and performance: lessons from a chilean retailer
Training is a vital part of company development, and determining and measuring how
training directly affects productivity, is a vital tool that affects the whole company and can
be used to discover hidden skills within a workforce. But demonstrating exactly howa tailor-
made training intervention can improve workers’ performance — and by how much — and
how investing in soft-skills can lead to productivity gains is notoriously tricky. It is one thing
to assert that improving leadership and communication skills has a positive impact on the
bottom-line, but quite another to put a figure on that improvement. More difficult still is
identifying the precise mechanismsthrough which those improvements are made.
This project, involving a Chilean national retail chain and funded by the Inter-American
Development Bank (IADB), is important because alongside the design and delivery of a
large-scale training intervention, it also set out to try to answer some of those difficult
questions through a parallel experimental study carried out by specialists from the IADB
and the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland (1). This study provides a
detailed, evidence-based assessment of the design and delivery ofthe training intervention
and a rigorous analysis of its outcomes.
Context
The client, a Chilean retail chain with a large market share in the footwear, clothing and
accessories sector, was struggling to quantify and qualify the impacts of its training
Jane Rexworthy is based at
the People 1st International,
London, UK.
DOI 10.1108/SHR-12-2019-0088 VOL. 19 NO. 2 2020, pp. 75-79, ©Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1475-4398 jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEW jPAGE 75

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