Investing in employee development now can have a big payoff in the long term, but to do it effectively takes more than annual bonuses and office happy hours.
Leaders who know how to develop employees retain talented people and energize them to reach their potential – building more resilient, successful organizations as a result.
This article will explain what employee development means and how it can improve the culture in your workplace.
Then, I’ll share some proven steps to implement an employee development plan and dramatically increase engagement, productivity, and human potential in the people you lead.
What is employee development?
Employee development is a powerful way to support the people you lead and help them feel valued. The process involves ongoing employee education, training, and mentorship to improve skills and encourage professional growth.
Companies must constantly innovate to stay ahead of the competition, and innovation is more than just creating cutting-edge products and services. It also means building a culture of creativity, collaboration, and personal growth in your workforce. That’s what happens when employee development is done right.
Employee development comes in many forms:
- Professional onboarding: Supporting new hires with clarity, education, and resources to learn their jobs and your company culture.
- Professional training: Offering and encouraging ongoing education and certification programs, to help your staff develop new skills.
- Leadership training: Empowering managers with leadership skills to strike the perfect balance between boss vs leader.
- Cross-departmental workshops: Encouraging company-wide collaboration and a shared culture.
- Personal development programs: Offering training and resources for personal growth to help people develop soft skills like conflict resolution, teamwork, and Conversational Intelligence®.
- Team building workshops: Promoting collaboration and cooperation among employees.
- Mentoring: Facilitating mentorships within your organization to help less experienced employees develop into leaders.
Why is employee development important?
If you had a way to improve profitability, productivity, and motivation in one stroke, would you do it? Of course, you would.
Employee development improves performance
It turns out that you can improve on nearly every important performance metric when it comes to your workforce through training and developing employees.
Having an employee development plan ensures that your team is knowledgeable on the latest trends and continues to learn new skills. More importantly, it demonstrates that your company is willing to invest in its people.
Here are some of the benefits of employee development.
Retention
A 2018 Workforce Learning Report from LinkedIn found that 93 percent of employees would stay at their company longer if it had invested in employee development.
The average US company spends about $4,000 and 24 days to hire a new worker, according to GlassDoor. Companies can avoid all that time and money spent looking for new hires by investing more in their current team members.
Engagement
Engagement measures the level of an employee’s commitment and connection to an organization. Studies show that employee engagement plays a big role in company performance, especially during tough economic times.
Employee engagement leads to better outcomes, like higher customer ratings, profitability, and productivity and lower turnover, theft, and absenteeism.
Companies can easily drive engagement by investing in learning and development (L&D). One study found that 80 percent of surveyed employees said that development programs would help them feel more engaged at work.
Motivation
Employees feel motivated when they understand the role they have to play in the success of an organization. They know their work actually matters, which is an essential element of self-motivation.
Plus, learning new skills increases their sense of self-worth because they see themselves making more valuable contributions over time.
Productivity
A 2013 study demonstrates that human resources training and development can have a significant impact on productivity within the workplace.
Employee development gives your team an opportunity to grow their knowledge and improve skills. This helps build their confidence. After all, people work better and more efficiently when they feel confident in what they are doing. It also prepares employees to take on higher roles and greater responsibilities.
Profitability
The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) collected data between 1996 and 1998, exploring the link between training expenditures and total stockholder return (TSR). Their research reveals that companies that spent more on employee development increased their returns.
And it didn’t take much investment to get results – spending $680 on development per employee above the average resulted in an increase of six percent TSR the following year.
Resilience
Employee development creates resilience within a company, on an individual level and for the company as a whole. Training employees to do their job, and to do it well, helps build the resilience to overcome challenges.
Development programs can help individuals build the mental toughness to bounce back when tested during stressful situations. This has an impact on the company as a whole; a resilient team can work together to overcome company-level challenges, like tough economic times or an unexpected crisis.
A 6-step cycle for employee development and supporting growth
Although every company will have its own unique goals when it comes to employee development, the fundamentals look the same.
SoulSalt’s 6-step cycle
It’s a process of helping people identify goals for personal and professional growth and supporting them to succeed.
In my coaching practice and leadership training programs, I teach leaders to use a 6-step cycle to develop people and support growth. For this article, I’ve simplified the cycle into a series of questions, so you can adapt it to your organization’s development goals and available resources.
If you’re leading a smaller team, use the cycle in scheduled one-on-one meetings, working through the steps with individual employees over time.
Larger organizations can use the cycle to build a more structured program and bring in the right training to support growth and develop future leaders.
1. What’s your motivation for development?
Focus on the needs of your team
An effective employee development plan puts the employee at its center. Design a program that actually meets the needs of your team by looking inward.
On an individual level, help employees identify their motivation and a vision for how they want to grow. Ask questions to help employees look inward:
- What are you going for?
- What do you see happening?
- What do your core values tell you about your next career move?
- What is your “why” – your key motivation?
On a macro level, you also have to look inward as an organization to create an employee-centric development plan.
Here are a few questions to keep in mind as you establish the goals and structure of your plan:
- Do we know what needs to expand and grow?
- Why do we want to invest in supporting employees?
- What do we value in our company culture?
- What leadership qualities do we want to see more of?
- What areas do our employees want to improve, and why?
A study from Wakefield Research found that over 90 percent of employees would prefer that managers present learning opportunities often and discuss mistakes when they happen. Harvard Business Review reports that 70 percent of employees don’t feel they have adequate mastery of skills to do their job well.
Meet with employees and send out surveys to find out sources of stress at work and suggestions to improve your company culture, both for managers and their teams. Ask staff what they feel is missing in terms of support and growth opportunities in your company.
Use all of what you learn to clarify your motivation and establish a vision for your development plan.
2. What does success look like?
A survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management found that nearly 84 percent of HR professionals do not use structured employee development programs.
Instead, they implement programs and hope for the best—not a great approach if you really want your employee development plan to succeed.
In the first step, you uncovered the values and motivation behind development. Now, it’s time to establish concrete goals. Take the time to define and agree on what success looks like for individuals, teams, and the company.
Support individual growth by tying motivation to measurable long-term goals.
Establish what success looks like
What skills might need to be strengthened in order to achieve it? During this step, it’s helpful to look at how others have succeeded in a similar goal.
At a company-wide level, you’ll want to measure the effectiveness of your program, to make sure it’s working, avoid wasting resources, and improve in areas that need it.
When running a company, you might prioritize the bottom line above all. Of course, dollars and cents certainly matter. But you should consider a number of factors when establishing what success looks like:
- How confident do employees feel in their ability to succeed?
- How well does your team collaborate?
- Do your managers know how to lead a team?
- How well is your team, in terms of physical and mental health?
- Is your investment in development paying off?
With clear goals, you can check in regularly to ensure you are moving in the right direction.
3. What is your capacity to succeed?
Implementing people development strategies means having a clear view of the way things are and setting goals for what you can become. To move forward, identify the resources, strengths, and experiences you can leverage for success.
At an organizational level, that means making sure the time and resources are available to follow through on your commitment. If you tell employees that you value their growth and development, be sure to prioritize and invest in them.
On an individual basis, you can help employees identify their strengths, and discuss how their past experiences can support them in reaching their next goal. Consider a formal mentorship program to help the next generation of leaders learn from the experiences of others.
Encourage health and wellness
A company culture that supports growth should nurture the potential of each and every employee. That means creating a workplace that encourages health and wellness, so employees have the capacity to take on new challenges.
It probably comes as no surprise that workplace stress has a huge negative impact on your employees’ abilities to perform:
- 80 percent of workers in the US reported feeling stressed due to ineffective company communication, says USAToday.
- 66 percent have lost sleep due to work-related stress, according to Forbes.
- 16 percent of respondents quit their jobs because they felt overwhelmed, says Stress.org.
If employees don’t have the resources to manage stress and do their jobs effectively, they will not have the capacity to grow. Offer health incentives like company-wide wellness programs to support the physical and mental health of staff.
Make time available for training and development, so it’s not an extra source of stress.
4. What does outside feedback tell you?
Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to see the full picture.
Step out for a clear view
External feedback can spark meaningful conversations about current company culture. When you go outside of your organization for perspective, you get an unbiased opinion about how things are going.
This provides a holistic picture of how teams work together, so you can make adjustments and apply employee development programs effectively.
Outside feedback is also essential as you help individuals establish their personal development plans. Ask them:
- What are you hearing from the people you lead?
- What are your supervisors saying about you?
- What are interactions with your colleagues like?
This feedback can be used to identify what’s holding someone back from moving forward within a company, as well as opportunities to build on existing strengths.
5. What happens next?
You need a plan to achieve the goals you’ve identified for employee development. Whether it’s a company wide initiative or mapping individual paths with the people you lead, establish clear action steps to move forward.
The steps will look different for every organization and each individual, but generally, it should involve a commitment to specific actions over the next 24, 48, and 72 hours.
For many companies, the action steps will include providing access to workshops and other kinds of training. You can start by checking out some of the group coaching bootcamps we offer, to see if they align with your development goals.
Take action
Whether you want to build leadership capacity, improve communication skills, or collaborate more effectively, growth won’t happen without taking action.
6. How will you stay accountable and get support?
The word accountability often has a negative connotation to it. You might associate it with “who’s to blame”. But when implemented correctly, accountability brings clarity and ownership. It gives people a clear target of what they can do and what role they have to play in the success of a company.
Accountability, in this sense, means showing trust in the people you’re supporting to follow through on their commitments. It means setting expectations, clarifying ambiguity, and making agreements with your team.
Leadership goals
Leaders should provide the support that empowers employees to achieve their goals. They should also feel comfortable asking for feedback on how they could do better in supporting growth.
Here are a few ways to establish accountability and support ongoing employee development:
- Encourage open communication to address challenges as they arise.
- Schedule monthly meetings to check in and plan the next action steps.
- Define what success looks like for individuals and your employee development program as a whole.
- Make sure that management supports teams, providing the resources needed throughout the process.
- Assess progress along the way with clear metrics for success.
- Ask for ongoing feedback about staff development programs.
Ready to invest in human potential?
The success of any organization ultimately depends on the mindset and performance of your employees. Invest in people now, and you’ll see the results for years to come.
If your work culture needs to change, Leadership Bootcamp is for you. It’s a group coaching program for inspiring change and empowering leadership teams to succeed.
Get in touch for support in building your company’s capacity to develop people and support growth.