The high cost of not training staff

There is an old training conundrum, where the CEO asks from the cost perspective "What if we [...] train our staff and they leave?" and the HR person who replies "What if we don’t train them and they stay?" (Hackel, 2017). While I have not seen this cited from a peer-reviewed source, I have heard this may have been the bon mot of Tom Peters: 

"Management guru, Tom Peters, at a live event, was extolling the virtues of training managers in proper leadership and management skills. One senior manager asked, 'What if we train them, and they leave?' He responded, 'What if you don’t train them, and they stay?'" (Burns, 2023).

Regardless of whether this quip was the speedy thoughts of a faceless HR person or the bon mot of Tom Peters, the principle is the key: from an organisational perspective, training staff is risky. From the organisation's point of view, that risk needs to be evaluated to ensure there is a return on investment: 

• Will the investment yield a positive return?
• Is the investment worth the potential productivity increase?
• Is the investment low enough risk?
• Wwill the investment add to shareholder value?
• Will NOT making the investment cost the company more than doing it?

But it also needs to be evaluated as a lack-of development risk which can be monetary costs or non-monetary (Garstang, 2021), covering a range of staff and organisational development factors:

• Current skill maintenance (Garstang, 2021; Podmoroff, 2005)
• Maintaining institutional knowledge (Garstang, 2021)
• Current organisational operational preparedness (Garstang, 2021; Podmoroff, 2005)
• Meeting human capability forecasts (Garstang, 2021)
• Determining if under-investment will cause higher staff turnover - if competitors are training (Podmoroff, 2005)
• Knowing recruitment costs - e.g. at the salary of the replacement person plus 50% of the first year as a productivity loss in getting up to speed. This is made up of costs around recruitment, selection, and hiring (including writing the contract and onboarding); time and resources required to train a replacement; productivity loss prior to the exiting employee going and during the new employee's onboarding; increased H&S risks with a new employee (Podmoroff, 2005; Stup et al., 2025)
• Knowing likely appointment delay; wrong hire risk (Podmoroff, 2005).

It becomes easy to see that the risk of not training is a lot greater than training.

Sam

References:

Burns, K. (2023, October 11). But What If We Train Them and They Leave?. Kevin Burns Blog. https://www.kevburns.com/blog/but-what-if-we-train-them-and-they-leave

Garstang, A. (2021). The transition from training to work roles [Master thesis, Massey University]. https://mro.massey.ac.nz/server/api/core/bitstreams/b3dd663b-78ef-4534-b0da-2462bd5de9a3/content

Hackel, E. (2017). The Cost of Poor Performance: Why Failing to Train your Employees Costs A lot More Than You Think. Canadian Manager, 42(1), 7-9. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Cost+of+Poor+Performance%3a+Why+Failing+to+Train+your+Employees...-a0619219982

Podmoroff, D. (2005). How to Hire, Train & Keep the Best Employees for Your Small Business. Atlantic Publishing Company.

Stup, R. E., MacKenzie, M. K., & Lutz, K. A. (2025). Onboarding dairy farm employees: Improving the new employee experience. Journal of Dairy Science, 108(4), 4462-4473. https://doi.org/10.3168/jds.2024-25319

 * NotebookLM was used to create the claymation-style infographic components in the image accompanying this post