One key factor in employee motivation and retention is the opportunity employees want to continue to grow and develop job and career enhancing skills. In fact, this opportunity to continue to grow and develop through training and development is one of the most important factors in employee motivation.
There are a couple of secrets about what employees want from training and development opportunities, however. Plus, training and development opportunities are not just found in external training classes and seminars. These ideas emphasize what employees want in training and development opportunities. They also articulate your opportunity to create devoted, growing employees who will benefit both your business and themselves through your training and development opportunities.
You can impact training and development significantly through the responsibilities in an employee’s current job.
Expand the job to include new, higher level responsibilities.
Reassign responsibilities that the employee does not like or that are routine.
Provide more authority for the employee to self-manage and make decisions.
Invite the employee to contribute to more important, department or company-wide decisions and planning.
Provide more access to important and desirable meetings.
Provide more information by including the employee on specific mailing lists, in company briefings, and in your confidence.
Provide more opportunity to establish goals, priorities, and measurements.
Assign reporting staff members to his or her leadership or supervision.
Assign the employee to head up projects or teams.
Enable the employee to spend more time with his or her boss.
Provide the opportunity for the employee to cross-train in other roles and responsibilities.
Training and Development Options: Internal Training and Development
Employees appreciate the opportunity to develop their knowledge and skills without ever leaving work or the workplace. Internal training and development brings a special plus. Examples, terminology, and opportunities reflect the culture, environment, and needs of your workplace.
Enable the employee to attend an internally offered training session. This session can be offered by a coworker in an area of their expertise or by an outside presenter or trainer.
Ask the employee to train other employees with the information learned at a seminar or training session. Offer the time at a department meeting or lunch to discuss the information or present the information learned to others.
Perform all of the activities listed before, during, and after a training session to ensure that the learning is transferred to the employee’s job.
Offer commonly-needed training and information on an Intranet, an internal company website.
Training and Development Options: External Training and Development
Especially to develop new skills and ideas, employee attendance at external training is a must. Attaining degrees and university attendance enhance the knowledge and capabilities of your staff while broadening their experience with diverse people and ideas.
Enable the employee to attend an external seminar, conference, speaker, or training event.
Perform all of the activities listed before, during, and after a training session to ensure that the learning is transferred to the employee’s job.
Pay for the employee to take online classes and identify low or no cost online (and offline) training
Pay for memberships in external professional associations with the understanding that employees will attend meetings, read the journals, and so forth and regularly update coworkers.
Provide a flexible schedule so the employee can take time to attend university, college, or other formal educational sessions.
Provide tuition assistance to encourage the employee's pursuit of additional education.
Allow employees to pursue training and development in directions they choose, not just in company-assigned and needed directions.
Recognize that the key factor is keeping the employee interested, attending, and engaged.
The development of a life-long engaged learner is a positive factor for your organization no matter how long the employee chooses to stay in your employ.
Use these training and development activities to ensure that you optimize the employee's motivation and potential retention.
Human Resource Management (HRM) is the function within an organization that focuses on recruitment of, management of, and providing direction for the people who work in the organization.
Human Resource Management is the organizational function that deals with issues related to people such as compensation, hiring, performance management, organization development, safety, wellness, benefits, employee motivation, communication, administration, and training.
Spread word-of-mouth information about the position availability, or eventual availability, to each employee so they can constantly look for superior candidates in their networks of friends and associates.
In this age of online social and professional networking, the chances are, you and your employees are instantly connected to hundreds, and even thousands, of potential candidates.
Tap into this potential audience on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, to name just a few.
Use trade show booth time to meet and get to know potential candidates as well as customers.
Encourage employees to gather business cards from, and develop relationships with, high potential possible employees.
And, don't stop with employees alone; tap the networks of your social, board, funder and academic connections, too.
In a client company, the sales manager referred a childhood friend, who was moving back to our state, for a position.
Hiring the right employee is a challenging process. Hiring the wrong employee is expensive, costly to your work environment, and time consuming. Hiring the right employee, on the other hand, pays you back in employee productivity, a successful employment relationship, and a positive impact on your total work environment.
Hiring the right employee enhances your work culture and pays you back a thousand times over in high employee morale, positive forward thinking planning, and accomplishing challenging goals. This is not a comprehensive guide to hiring an employee. But, these are key steps to hiring the right employee.