The companies have put focus on the personnel selection process as an essential tool for have talent in work teams, and they have succeeded in giving more importance to everything related to recruitment. However, there are still many organizations that make the mistake of "forgetting" to develop employees once they enter the company.
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Normally, this is because they understand that if the candidate fits the profile well, they will be a good worker. But this means assuming that the work environment is always exactly the same, when reality shows us that it is not.
Absolutely all employees of a company need to go through a development process that allows them to keep skills and abilities up to date that, at the time, made them the right candidates to fill a job.
If the company is able to develop and retain talent, it will not have to face the challenge of filling positions for which it is not easy to find good candidates.
Therefore, within the objectives of the Human Resources department, the goal of to develop employees. But what exactly are we talking about and how can we achieve it? Let's see it in more detail.
What is employee development?
It is an internal process that is carried out in the company and that consists of improve and strengthen skills and abilities of staff members, as well as encourage the development of new capacities that are useful in your job.
The company cannot place the responsibility of continuing to develop professionally on the shoulders of its employees. For example, if we need the employees of the administration department to speak French, because we have obtained an important client in France, we cannot expect these people to dedicate their resources and their free time to training. It is the company that must provide this training.
Achieving employee development implies an investment of time and money for companies, but it is also a process that benefits everyone involved. Workers feel more valued and develop new skills that they can use in their jobs, while the company achieves a more qualified, more motivated and more productive workforce.
In addition, when the organization shows concern for the professional development of its employees, they feel happier and both the rate of turnover and absenteeism are reduced, which implies great savings for the company. In other words, with the implementation of measures of this type, everything is advantageous.
Tips to develop employees.
1. Know the starting point
The first thing the company needs to know is where it stands: does it already have an employee development program in place? If it does, is it being effective? Does it apply to the entire workforce or only to certain positions?
The organization must be clear about what it is doing regarding this issue, but also what is your attitude: Do you see the development of your workers as a win-win, do they really understand its value, or do you feel it is a burden and a problem?
If the company is not convinced that these processes can be useful, it will never put enough interest in them and they will not bear the fruit that would be desirable. Therefore, the first thing to do may be to address a mentality change in managers and change in organizational culture, making professional and personal development one of the most important goals to achieve.
2. Do a skills gap analysis
We are at a point where the company is already convinced that it must invest in developing skills, and has verified that what it has been doing up to now is not enough, so the next step is to get down to work with the analysis of the skills.
Evaluating the different positions of the organization we can see what skills would be desirable in employees, but they are very poorly developed, or even not at all. From that moment, you can start designing a training plan that is really effective.
3. Identification of employees willing to develop
You have to identify those people who really have a willingness to continue advancing professionally and want to learn new things. Always starting from the basis that not all employees are interested in professional development.
If there are problems locating these people, the easiest thing to do is consult directly with workers what is their position regarding the development of new professional skills, and in what subjects would they like to be trained.
Once located, you have to go case by case assessing competencies that each member of the staff has and determining what skills or abilities it would be necessary for them to develop in order to carry out their work more effectively.
A good way to obtain this information is to use the selection data. The report prepared at the time by the selector on the profile of the candidate, and the tests and tests to which he was subjected, can provide very useful information about his strengths and weaknesses. An example of these tests is Hirint, if you want to know more book a meeting here
4. Align company and employee goals
It is possible that the development that the employee wants has nothing to do with what the company is pursuing.
Going back to the example we saw before of the employees in the administration department, we may have an employee who is very willing to train and develop, but perhaps learning a new language is not what he has in mind, and he is more interested in specializing in the use of state-of-the-art business management software.
For this reason, a basic step to achieve development is to ensure that the company and the workers aim for the same goal. That there is a correlation between the skills that the employee wishes to develop and those that the company needs and in which it wants to offer training.
Why is this so important? Because, for training programs to be successful, there must be a full involvement by the worker. If we put an employee who is not interested in this subject on an intensive French course, they will surely not take advantage of it enough.
5. Think ahead
The employee development plan must take into account the skills and abilities that are needed today, but also those that will be needed in the future. It is important to analyze the way in which both the company itself and the economic sector in which it operates are growing and evolving.
Doing this planning gives us very interesting information about what the organization will need for the future. For example, if the workforce is expected to grow, it would be interesting to train certain employees in matters related to leadership, so that they can promote and become the bosses of the new members of the workforce.
6. Look at what the competition has done
All companies have to look at what their competition is doing in terms of service provision, productivity, marketing, internal process management, etc. Not to copy what others are doing, but to detect weaknesses and strengths in their way of acting, and develop an action plan that is even more efficient.
Well, with employee training you have to do exactly the same thing. If there are already other companies that are applying career development measures, it is useful to be aware of what they have done and what results it has given them. This will allow more effective decisions to be made about what to do and what not to do.
7. Choose the most appropriate type of training
Training requires dedication and commitment on the part of the worker, and we cannot ask him to allocate an important part of what should be his free time to it.
In the event that the training cannot be given within working hours, it will have to be adjusted as much as possible and, in any case, it is necessary to seek formulas that are more dynamic than traditional style training.
Sessions can be used coaching, to on-the-job training, the microlearning or cross training. There are many alternatives to make it easier for the employee to develop new skills.
Finally, we must not lose sight of the need to make a monitoring of results. It is useless to invest resources in training if later we cannot be sure that the planned objectives have been achieved. Therefore, within the development plan, a system for monitoring and analyzing the results cannot be missing.
Employee development is something that must happen from the very beginning. It starts with the initial basic training that the new worker receives when they start work, and continues through continuous training, and the result is a workforce that is much better prepared to face the challenges that lie ahead.