If you’ve spent any time reading about organizations, leadership, or team improvements, you’ve likely read about employee development. Even with so much knowledge about it, too many organizations fail to implement any kind of development programs or opportunities. With the benefits put on display, it might be easier to implement an employee development program within your organization.
What is Employee Development?
Essentially, employee development is employer-offered skills training within an organization. Employee development programs typically provide employees with the necessary skills to better themselves and their efforts toward their work. Offerings may include skills for current or future positions, although most organizations prefer to keep well developed workers within the organization.
In fact, one of the hesitations regarding employee development is that organizations don’t want to put in the time, effort, and money to develop employees who will go to work for the competitor. Strangely enough, organizations who provide employee development programs tend to have better retention rates than the alternative, among other benefits.
Why Does Employee Development Matter?
There are several reasons why employee development matters. Truthfully, if your organization does not have any employee development, missing benefits is not the only concern. Without employee development, organizations can meet heavy failures that are difficult to come back from.
Nonetheless, understanding what’s great about employee development is essential to encouraging organizations to implement programs.
1. Fight the Skill Shortage
Have you or anyone in your organization ever complained about the lack of skilled workers available? Guess what, friends?! You can help develop skilled workers. You don’t have to hire the picture perfect employee right out of the gate. Instead, hire those with potential and willingness to learn, then provide them with education. Ta-daa! Skilled workers.
2. Attract the Best
Workers who want to improve and grow are workers who are typically categorized as the best. The best always want to do better tomorrow than they did yesterday. If people are seeking out organizations that offer employee development programs, they are commonly the best.
3. Career Growth
Few people want to get a job and stay in that exact same role with the exact same responsibilities for the entirety of their career. Employees want to grow in their career with new titles and job descriptions and pay raises. Professional development options allow employees to work toward career growth and advancement.
4. Improved Abilities in Unexpected Situations
Did you know that employees who are continually trained and educated are more apt at approaching the unexpected? This is because various training programs and sessions contribute to a worker’s overall knowledge. While there can be completely unexpected situations, the experiences learned in training sessions enhance abilities for everyday and unexpected situations.
5. Employee Retention
Most organizations want to find the employees who are going to stay long term. Hiring and training new employees too often is costly and damaging to the organization and its teams. When organizations invest in the employees, the employees are more likely to remain employed at that organization.
6. Increased Performance and Reached Potential
When training and employee development is a priority for companies, the workers become better performers. They are more likely to reach their highest potential when the organization offers the chance to improve their skills.
Improved skills, improved performance, improved people.
7. Employee Engagement
Engagement is a buzzword these days, but it truly matters. Finding effective ways to garner employee engagement is always something to aim for because engagement impacts efficiency and productivity, profits, work culture, turnover, and employee and customer relationships.
By utilizing an effective professional development program, organizations can give the opportunity to spend time with coworkers in a different environment, teach them how to apply the knowledge they learn, and share that knowledge with others.
8. Employees Feel Valued
Sometimes people just want to feel valued. A paycheck is what keeps most people working, but if they do not feel valued, it is unlikely they will stay with that company for as long as they could. Making people feel valued is vital to creating a positive work environment. Employee development programs tell the workers, “You’re worth developing.”
9. Improved Profitability
This one shouldn’t be hard to convince anyone of – just look at the statistics regarding employee development programs and the profitability of a company. A recent study showed that organizations with an effective employee development program have double the profits than those with no dedicated program. DOUBLE!
10. Align Education Opportunities with Organizational Needs
With so many baby boomers retiring right now, there are a lot of skilled jobs becoming available. When organizations have employee development programs, they have the people in their organization qualified to take those vacated positions. However, if employee development is not a priority, organizations are forced to go on the hunt for outside hires who may or may not fit in with the culture and needs.
Education opportunities can be easily aligned with the organization’s needs. If Bob from accounting is retiring in a couple of years, now is the time to get Sarah and Conner into educational courses to learn Bob’s job and tasks.
Developing a Powerful Employee Development Plan
The employee development plan might seem overwhelming when you see how much possibility there is for such a thing. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Start with just a couple of development options first. Your organization can always expand when the initial program gains more traction.
Examine Organizational Goals and Desired Outcomes
What is the vision? Which goals have been set to reach said vision?
Knowing the answers to these questions is essential to creating an effective employee development program. You must know where you’re going to get there. If you have a goal of going 100% remote within the next 5 years, you would probably focus on an employee development program that included virtual communications, team building, and so on.
Adjust Employee Workload During Trainings
Often employees refuse getting in on extra training or educational opportunities because they don’t have the time or mental energy to take on more at the time. Be mindful of this and consider making adjustments to employee workloads to compensate for the time they’ll be spending in training sessions.
Employee Development Plans Should Be Individualized
You can’t write up a blanket employee development plan for everyone. People have different goals, expectations, and motivators. Treating them all the same would be a mistake.
For instance, Kyle’s five year plan includes two promotions and a master’s degree. Stephanie, on the other hand, plans to remain in the same position but take on extra responsibilities for higher pay around a flexible work schedule for leisure traveling. Would you imagine expecting Stephanie to accomplish all of the same courses and training sessions that Kyle plans to?
Treat each employee as an individual (always, not just in the planning process!).
Offer Development Programs
In house employee development programs are a great way to kick off a development program. The employees don’t have to go anywhere, take on extra hours, or anything complicated. They often simply show up at a certain work hour once a week for some learning.
Of course, your organization’s employee development program doesn’t have to follow the same model. However, should you choose to implement a program, that’s a great way to start.
Review Attempts and Garner Feedback
When you offer employee development options, consider asking the people for feedback. Most might say, “It was great,” or “I learned a lot.” This kind of feedback isn’t what you’re looking for. Look for details and raw honesty. If necessary, make the feedback process anonymous. Go over what was done and how to improve on it for the next session or class.
Examples of Employee Development Opportunities
There are so many ways to include employee development within your organization.
Mentorship and Shadowing
A mentorship can be an enlightening relationship. By selectively pairing up an experienced employee with a younger one, organizations can encourage development in the youthful employees. These employees will be carrying the company into the future and it is important to share knowledge between generations.
Allowing newer employees to shadow the veterans is also an opportunity in employee development. The new employees can see how the most experienced employees speak to others, how they work, and all the details of their daily process. It can be helpful to understand how the older employees work.
Coaching
Coaching differs from mentoring because it is a shorter time frame for developing the relationship. It also tends to single out employees for their perceived potential or achievements, rather than being offered to all who might succeed. Coaching is a learning method for those who want to learn and develop in a quicker setting.
Luncheons
Your organization can host a monthly luncheon where highly successful presenters share information with employees. The opportunity is great for developing outside relationships while also catering to the learning needs of the organization and team members.
Many employees are willing to take part in such events because the food is free and the learning is an added benefit. Utilizing luncheons is a great way to expose employees to various kinds of people with many different skill sets.
Departmental Project Rotations or Cross Training
Imagine an internship program that gives the interns an opportunity to work in each department. Medical professionals do this – I remember my husband in paramedic school, doing a rotation on the ambulance, in the ER, in geriatrics, in pediatrics, etc. With such varied opportunities, the chances of learning something new was frequent. Other industries should do this, too!
I’m not saying that the IT manager should leave his job for the next few months to work in accounting. But some intermingling can do wonderful things for employee development! What kind of cross training can benefit your organization? Consider this when creating your employee development plan.
Professional Training Sessions
What would happen if your organization sent some people to a seminar or professional training session a few hours away? Maybe there is a training event going on downtown in your own city. Providing employees access to these events and training are a great way to invest in the team.
Tuition Assistance
Sometimes extra education can be better when it is done through an accredited university or college. Unfortunately, modern day education is pricey and employees don’t always want to fork over the cash or take out student loans to learn something new.
This is where tuition assistance comes into play. There are contracts that can be written up to protect your investment – as I mentioned before, my husband went to paramedic school. It was completely employer-funded, as long as he continued to work for the organization for two years following the completion of the degree. Similar contracts can be drawn up. The importance lies in providing the ability for employees to learn from higher education when desired or necessary.
Challenging Tasks and Assignments
It can be hard to learn something new when you do the same tasks every single day at work. What would happen to Sam if he were to take on a task slightly harder than his usual? How would Mike manage if given an assignment that his boss usually handles? Could Tara succeed at a challenge that she’s never handled before?
Not only will these opportunities show employees and their employers what they can achieve when given the opportunity, it will stretch their own perception of what’s possible. They can learn something new from the work and tasks they take on. If there is a learning curve, let them learn it.
Job Enlargement and Enrichment
Promotions are a big deal – and not always immediately possible. However, you can use job enlargement and enrichment for employee development opportunities. Adding some additional responsibilities to the job description might not warrant a whole new position or title, but it encourages learning. By enriching the employee with bonuses or a pay raise, they can learn from what is now their new job description.
Effective Feedback and Review
Use your quarterly review time for fantastic feedback and employee development. You can’t simply say, “You’re doing well; we’ll check in in a few months!” That gives the employee nothing to go on and nothing to improve on. By offering better feedback, you can teach the team members how to develop their skills and improve themselves.
Start an Employee Development Program Now!
While big or long-term employee development programs can be costly, you don’t have to start with huge courses right off the bat. In fact, developing a useful program starts with simply starting the program. You can plan and talk about employee development until you’re blue in the face – but it’s the action that matters most.
Take action and implement employee development options today.