How to Improve Employee Development
When managing a team, promoting progression of employees’ skill sets and knowledge not only advances their career but also has the effect of benefitting the company. As a manager, you should also be implementing strategies to consistently improve output and reduce staff turnover. An ideal way to achieve those goals is by investing in tactics to improve employee development.
Employee development programs focus on aiding each employee with career growth and progression. It involves training, mentoring, and skill and experience growth. Ideally, as staff grow, they will get rewarded by moving up the hierarchy in your organization instead of leaving for another position.
If interested in implementing this highly beneficial strategy, read on for nine ways to promote professional development in the workplace.
What is Employee Development?
Employee development is a process by which employees improve their knowledge, skills, and experience with the help of their employer and higher-ups in the company. Ways to do this include attending training courses, being provided with a coach or mentor, and being given new and more complex tasks to work on.
Why is Employee Development Important?
There are many reasons why you should improve employee development. A primary motivation for implementing employee development strategies is its effect on employee retention.
Replacing employees is time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, you want to have a strategy to retain employees and promote internally. By offering employee development, the employee sees value in staying with the company. The business also benefits from more qualified candidates that know exactly how the operation runs.
In addition, a strong employee development program can attract top talent. No matter how great your development program is, you’ll always have some vacancies that can’t get filled internally. So, you want to ensure you put yourself forward as an appealing company to work for when recruiting external candidates.
Lastly, employee development programs result in better output from employees. Your team's knowledge, skillset, and experience will increase significantly, and you’ll find reaching KPIs becomes easier and quicker.
Who is Responsible for Employee Development?
Improving employee development is a top-down task but should involve the entire team. Top-level management needs to be on board with implementing development tactics. They must then create a model that sees every employee in the hierarchy growing professionally and contributing to the growth of others.
Employee development programs increase employee motivation, reduce turnover, and attract top talent.
9 Ways to Improve Employee Development
Now you understand the importance of employee development, let's discuss how to develop employee skills.
Set Employee Development Goals
As with anything you want to accomplish with your employees, setting goals is crucial when improving employee development. Programs also need to be personalized to each employee.
Set meetings with each employee to see how they want to grow professionally. If these wants are achievable, set goals corresponding to them and set out an employee development plan. How will these be accomplished? Who will train and mentor the employee? And what will the employee gain in accomplishing the goals?
Track these goals and adjust as needed. Once met, discuss next employee development goals. These new goals may be an advancement on what was already achieved or could cover a new skill or experience area.
2. Provide Feedback
Feedback on employee training and development goals should be given continuously as employees complete tasks relating to the goals. Don't just provide feedback during in-frequent meetings, reviews, or the like.
Employees must know their weaknesses and where they need to improve as well as their strengths to successfully grow professionally. However, ensure you aren’t micromanaging and always offer constructive feedback. If things must be improved, try to state something they did well, followed by ways to improve next time.
To improve employee development, set career progression goals with each team member.
3. Offer Rewards and Recognition
When working to improve employee development, you have to keep staff engaged and motivated. Recognizing and rewarding efforts and successes is an effective way to do so.
While increasing experience and learning new skills is a significant benefit in itself to employees, make sure they are also rewarded as they grow. If employees aren’t rewarded, they’ll likely take their new skills to another employer who compensates them appropriately. This outcome is the opposite of what is intended when investing in employee training and development.
Depending on the success achieved, offer non-monetary rewards before raises and finally a promotion. Try to set out these perks when you set up employee development goals.
For example, achieving the first set of professional development goals gets a non-monetary reward, such as an extra vacation day. The next set of goals might get a raise before the employee can finally have a promotion if a final set of development goals is achieved. The process can then start again in that new position.
Ensure rewards are outlined in advance. When discussing employee development goals, also discuss what will be gained by improving themselves professionally.
4. Train Managers Effectively
Your managers are some of the principal team members that will influence the development of other employees. You must invest in management and train them to understand the importance of employee development at every level of the hierarchy.
Of course, they also need to learn how to implement employee training and development strategies, if they don’t already. In addition, incentivize managers to initiate these programs and reward them as employees under their leadership succeed and grow.
Offering employees rewards for meeting goals can help them feel that their accomplishments are noticed.
5. Encourage Other Employees to Mentor and Coach
In such a competitive hiring landscape, encouraging employees to give one hundred percent when teaching and mentoring other employees can be challenging. This issue is especially prevalent if the employees being taught are close to their mentor’s skill level.
Nobody wants to teach and train someone who then takes their job, promotion, or dream job at another company! Therefore, you must set up an employee development model that sees everyone achieve, grow, and move up the career ladder.
6. Don’t Forget About Personal Development
When looking to improve employee development, don’t forget about personal skills. Total employee development isn’t just about improving skills and technical knowledge. This type of professional development includes soft skills, like improving communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.
7. Offer Access to as Many Learning Resources as Possible
A big part of employee development is learning from co-workers and working on more varied and challenging tasks. But, giving employees access to learning resources is important too.
These resources could include:
Books and industry publications
Classes and courses
Paid online content
Virtual or in-person conferences, events, and seminars
Having other employees act as mentors is a proven tactic for meeting employee development goals.
8. Allow for Cross-Departmental Collaboration
A way to improve employee development is allowing employees to work and collaborate with individuals from other departments. This process improves soft skills, including collaboration and problem solving, and gives them a broader view of the company.
In doing this, the employee may additionally discover a new area of the company they are interested in, helping them find their true career passion.
Understanding different departments and how they work is also ideal for those looking to move into high-level management positions. You can know everything about your department, but if you don’t understand how the rest of the company works, you won’t succeed in a manager position.
9. Implement Employee Development Continuously
When you decide to implement employee training and development strategies, you must do so consistently. This process needs to be thought about and implemented every day, with adjustments being made to each employee’s career progression plan as you go.
Ways to Improve Employee Development Remotely
Having a remote team doesn’t mean you can’t implement a strategy to improve employee development.
Along with following the above employee development suggestions, you’ll want to communicate virtually with staff regularly to see how their employee development plan is progressing. When managing remote employees and their development, you’ll also need to be more active at facilitating mentor meetings and collaboration meetings with other employees and departments.
In Conclusion
Investing in employee development is crucial and should be implemented by every company. Development programs not only improve your employees and help them advance in their careers, but they also improve the quality and quantity of output and reduce turnover and hiring costs.
If you don’t currently have an employee development program, now is the time to start to better both your staff and the company as a whole.