Employee growth is crucial in modern business – and this is especially true in the age of ‘the great resignation’. Employers are increasingly investing a great deal of time and money into promoting personal and collective growth and development in their workforces. With that in mind, here are four factors that heavily influence the success of these important initiatives.
Workplace Culture
Workplace culture plays a huge part in the creation of an atmosphere that promotes employee growth. A culture of apathy can quite easily develop if employees do not feel empowered within a team and encouraged to grow and improve their positions.
However, the creation of a positive workplace culture is not an overnight project. Instead, it involves the hiring of the right staff, the creation of communicative channels, and the development of responsive management structures.
The Right Tools
When promoting employee growth, the right education and training tools should be bought to bear. Educational platforms like Thinqi are popular with business leaders and HR teams that want to collect data on the progress of their employees while offering them digital learning resources.
Digital learning platforms can also help companies to provide growth and develop opportunities for employees despite the ‘new normal’ of hybrid and at-home work. They can enable businesses to source educational expertise from outside of their company structure without having to physically wrangle a talented specialist and bring them into their premises.
Internal Hiring
Promoting talent from within is an extremely effective method of filling senior positions. Internal hires reach their potential more swiftly, know the ins and outs of the company they work within, and can help to maintain workplace culture and important relationships. Hiring internally is also seen as being more financially efficient than hiring external talent.
In order to promote a workplace culture that values personal growth and development, the dedication of a company to the practice of internal recruitment should be made clear. Employees can only be expected to value growth and development if they are shown what the benefits of engagement with educational and developmental programs actually are.
Consistent Education
Opportunities for employees to improve their skills and knowledge must not be offered in a piecemeal fashion. Educational programs must be made available regularly or – in the case of digitally delivered education – all of the time. Employees must be given a continual stream of potential learning opportunities in order to grow in competence and initiative quickly.
Digital learning and development platforms have been a great gift to employers that want to offer consistent learning opportunities – even on relatively low budgets.
Consistency also influences several factors other than the speed at which individual employees can advance. Consistent learning opportunities help to create a workplace culture that enables upwards mobility and autonomous initiative at all levels.
It also helps to single out employees that make a special effort to improve their standing. If employees can choose to enhance their skills and knowledge at any time, the likelihood of skill gaps appearing after a person has left the company decreases.
