EMPLOYEE TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT: 3 TIPS FOR HR LEADERS

Training, learning and development is a topic that everyone hears about, but not many employers effectively action. Understandably, L&D (learning and development) is so broad and if you don’t work to niche it down, it can be overwhelming. But despite the tedious effort it can take to create processes for employee development – it’s crucial.

Why? Well, if you want employees to feel like their career has room for growth in your company, they need to be learning. A stagnant employee is a disengaged employee. And as soon as you have stagnancy, you increase your chances of turnover.

Not to mention, if you want to:

• Progress people into higher roles

• Have more and better leaders

• Have a better running organisation

… Employees need to be learning.

It’s common for managers to say that employees should just be learning and reaching out for learning opportunities on their own accord, and if they don’t they’re not ‘hungry enough’. And whilst this is partly true and employers should be seeing which employees take further initiative, if the culture you create doesn’t encourage development – people won’t be as motivated about it (or inclined to even speak about it).

The reality is, that waiting for employees to solely drive their development will lead to missed opportunities and unmet potential. So as a HR leader, it’s your job to work with managers to create relevant development processes.

TAILOR TRAINING TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE

Development is not a one-size-fits-all approach – a mistake that’s often made.

Other than the fact that there are different sectors in your organisation as well as different seniorities – there are also different people with different skill sets and career goals. But this isn’t to say that you need a 100% tailored training program for each person, it just means you need to involve people in their development.

You could have a rough progression plan for each position in the company, but conduct regular 1-1 meetings with employees so you can see where they’re at, what they need additional support with, preferred learning, and where they would like to see themselves progress. Once you know this, you can be more tactical with your approach to each employee.

FOSTER A LEARNING CULTURE

If you want employees to be motivated to develop – the environment needs to be motivating to develop.

Too many companies are too closed off when it comes to conversations about progression, almost as if it’s taboo to think about a promotion or extra influence in a company. But if you have a culture like this – expect employees to stay in their lane and not go to you about their manager's goals.

As a HR leader, one of your main focuses anyway would be to improve culture. As you do so, don’t underestimate the power of a learning and ambitious culture. Encourage a mindset where learning is not a periodic event but a continuous journey. Whether this is through:

• Quarterly learning sessions

• Publicly celebrating and acknowledging promotions

• On-the-job mentorship

… And the best one – peer-to-peer learning.

There can be a lot of hidden competition between employees, usually caused by the way the culture operates. If you create an individualistic culture, expect individualistic employees.

But with a team-oriented culture, employees are encouraged to:

• Collaborate

• Share resources

• Mentor junior employees

• Celebrate each other’s wins

Your best teachers are those employees who have learnt the ropes themselves.

HAVE LONG-TERM STRUCTURE

Training can be one of those vague pillars that HR departments put in place where it’s sort of there but after a while, everyone forgets about it.

For instance, your onboarding process could be fantastic and new employees feel motivated and ambitious… for now. Because months later, there are no structured conversations about their progression. There are no qualitative goals to reach, nor is there any advice on how to reach goals to begin with.

A study in 2022 showed that 63% of people don’t feel as though their boss supports their progression (The Independent). This in the end will only naturally lead to turnover so it’s crucial to have a clear structure employees can rely on.

One of the most effective and simple ways of achieving this is through a performance management strategy. This is a tangible system of 4 components that help you to keep track of employee’s performance, whilst supporting them towards progression.

And this strategy doesn’t have an endpoint. Every employee, no matter their position, no matter how long they’ve been at the company has the security to know that there is still room for them to learn and develop.

- Written by Oliver Howson

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