VET News

Four Ways to Improve your RTO

You want to run your business better. You have a long list of things to take your business to the next level but you don’t know where to start. Here are 4 things you can do in your RTO now that can have a significant impact.

1. MOTIVATE YOUR STAFF

In some ways, this is the easiest thing to do but is the most overlooked. Motivated and engaged staff can help make a business shine. It makes coming to work every day a pleasure, it improves your customer’s experience and it creates so much more productivity.

Motivating your staff doesn’t just mean taking them go-carting twice a year. It is more powerful to incorporate smaller more frequent instances of personal appreciation.

• Be genuinely interested in their lives (without being intrusive).
• Ask them their opinion on things and let them know when you follow through on their suggestion.
• Appreciate them as people.
• Occasionally commit small, personal random acts of kindness.

Motivating your staff makes them more invested in quality business outcomes. This is the most potent way of improving your RTO.

2. USE THE 90 PERCENT RULE

We all try to achieve perfection, or at least our idea of it. Sometimes the effort (and time) needed to take a project from 90% to 100% is more than it took to get the first 90% done. Is the last 10% worth it?

This applies to all things within your business. You can spend so much time trying to automate a process that the manual component works out to be more cost effective. You can spend so long perfecting the language of an enrolment email when most people will skim it, or not read it all.

This is about focusing on doing a good, consistent job without wasting your time trying to perfect it.

3. MAKE COMPLIANCE STANDARD PRACTICE

So many RTOs achieve compliance with countless hours of work either side of an audit. To achieve this compliance needs to become part of your company's DNA.

It's OK if you're not at that stage yet. Start making small changes to your standard processes today. These incremental updates will mean the world of difference at audit time.

Small, consistent changes now will make it so that when audit time comes you don’t spend so much time at work that you have to reintroduce yourself to your kids and pets when you finally make it home.

4. TAKE SOME TIME

This is a tough one. Time feels like the one luxury you don’t have when running an RTO. You need to take some time on a couple of levels.

Firstly, take some time to look at your business as a whole. You're so focused on the minutiae of daily tasks that there is no time to step back and look at your RTO on a macro level. You can trot all the ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ clichés you like but find some time to reflect on things from an elevated and holistic perspective.

Secondly, and the most difficult, take some time for yourself. Don’t become a burnt out husk. If you overwork that is when you make poor decisions or your physical well-being suffers. It doesn’t mean you should disappear on a Caribbean cruise for months at a time but take a few hours here and there for you. Your RTO will be much better for it.

Want more?

Enjoy these tips? We have 3 more things you can do in your RTO now that can have a significant impact. Find them here: https://tlrg.com.au/blogs/news/seven-ways-to-improve-your-rto

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matt Peachey is the Managing Director at The Learning Resources Group. Over the past decade, he has grown the small resource development company into one of the largest training resource providers in the country and industry leaders in digital and LLN space of Vocational Education Support.

Matt has spent extensive time working directly with RTOs all over the country to help them implement their training and assessment programs. He has also assisted a number of RTOs with their marketing and business strategies.

Date posted May 24, 2017