Training, productivity and performance: lessons from a chilean retailer.

Purpose: A project to improve productivity in one of the largest retail firms in Latin America demonstrates how a tailor-made training intervention can improve workers' performance and how — and by how much — investing in soft-skills can lead to productivity gains. Design/methodology/approach: Individual-level longitudinal information gathered from the firm. Findings: The training intervention was 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-American Development Bank and the Department of Economics, University of Maryland. Originality/value: The project is one of the first to be subject to a detailed analysis to provide evidence of the causal impact of training on direct productivity measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]