10 Effective Ways to Help Your Employees Grow

One of the most frustrating parts of recruitment is employee retention. Keeping hold of talent requires constant hard work. If your employers don’t feel valued, or you’re not helping them grow professionally, they will look elsewhere. Luckily, there are plenty of things you can do to help make your employees feel valued while promoting progression. Through professional development, employees will get something out of working with you. According to Udemy, 42% of people rate professional growth as the most important factor when deciding where to work. When you’re putting your HR plans into place, you should incorporate some or all of the following employee growth strategies.

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Provide Professional Coaching

Business leaders can nurture employee development by providing coaching and mentoring programs. Rather than bombarding staff with a constant stream of orders, they should work with employees to build a strong professional relationship. This works the same way as coaching does, and requires a management system based on effective education, direction, and communication. Although you should be taking on the principles of coaching within your management, this isn’t always attainable within small businesses. Therefore, you can outsource employee coaching to a company like Placement to help them achieve professional growth. Through Placement.com, your staff can access fully vetted work coaches who can support them in achieving their goals. You can offer this service as a benefit of employment to all new employees and avoid problems with hiring new employees.

Offer Regular Feedback

Carrying out monthly employee appraisals is important. However, why should an employee only get useful feedback once a month? The answer is simple - they shouldn’t. Instead, you should strive to offer regular feedback in real-time. Wakefield Research carried out a study and found that 90% of employees would benefit from having their shortcomings highlighted regularly. If you wait until the annual review to offer feedback, you aren’t offering enough time for your workforce to grow. As a business leader, you need to work with your HR team on a way to monitor employees and assess their strengths and weaknesses. Then, whether it’s you or a member of the management team, someone needs to relay the findings to employees. By doing this, you will find work improves and productivity remains high.

Cross-Train Staff

These days, with high amounts of work taking place online, there is a fine line between roles. Therefore, businesses should focus on teaching all areas of the business. For example, a project manager can put a plan into place, but they likely don’t have hands-on experience of front-line sales. Offering the opportunity to cross-train will help to create a working culture built on mutual appreciation and communication.

One of the most obvious places to look for this divide is in restaurants. Historically, chefs belittle the work of the server and vice versa. The chef will view their work as more tiring and demanding, which it is physically. However, the server needs to deal with people all day while running around headless. In this instance, restaurants should cross-train their staff. When each side experiences the other, they immediately gain an understanding which helps the business run more effectively. To delve deeper into the major hurdles faced by HR professionals in this dynamic industry, check out 8 Major Challenges for HR in the Food and Beverage Industry.

Conferencing and Networking

Whether it’s online or calls for a business trip, you should send your staff to conferences. While they’re away, they will meet like-minded people that they can learn from. Further, they will learn from external sources and thought leaders and be able to bring back their knowledge to benefit your business. Plus, who doesn’t love to get paid to get away from the mundane?

Recognize Achievements

Making people feel important is a great asset for boosting employee retention rates. As a business, you can do this by celebrating achievements regularly with a staff recognition tool. When someone does well, and they are told so, they are more likely to be productive in the future. When you reward exceptional rewards, you need to set the bar. You can do this by introducing different levels of achievement, and throwing in a fantastic reward at the higher end. By doing this, you will create a culture based on working hard and reaping excellent rewards. If you keep the rewards exciting and celebrate achievements regularly, you will build up a loyal workforce. Further, you may find that other people hear about the way your company works.

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Soft Skill Development

The world of work is built on skill. Soft skills refer to those related to personality traits that allow for success. Although you may not know they’re called soft skills, you will have heard of them. They include time management, communication, delegation, leadership, and many more. You need to begin recognizing these soft skills and providing sufficient training to enhance them. Doing this will help you boost productivity across the entire workforce.

Soft skills are vital but they are often overlooked. You can have an employee who has been at the company for years, knows their job, and gets work done but isn’t cut out for management. Alternatively, you can have fantastic leadership qualities but not be the most efficient worker. However, these qualities would set them apart perfectly for the world of delegation. Productivity is imperative, but soft skills are what counts towards creating an amazing work atmosphere.

Create Challenging Projects

People love to be challenged because it demonstrates capability. Therefore, assign special projects to groups that call for teamwork. Throughout the process they will share skills, learn from each other, and show their abilities. If you attach rewards and feedback to the exercise, you’re onto a winner.

Learning Management Systems

A Learning Management System (LMS) does what it sounds like it should. They offer a scalable solution to businesses to provide and monitor employee growth. Through the LMS, you can create learning materials and track progress. Then, if you need to have evidence of staff training, you can generate reports. Streamlining the learning process using an LMS will save considerable amounts of time and revenue, which is one of the benefits of LMS. Rather than hire numerous professionals, you can create materials for everything all in one place. Say goodbye to lengthy staff training sessions, and hello to efficient professional development

Consistently Find Growth Opportunities

The way the world works is changing all the time, and there will constantly be new and valid needs of the employee. As a successful business, you should keep up to date with HR trends. No business should create a professional and development strategy in the beginning and never update it. Employees are a business’s most important asset; therefore, they should be treated in high regard.

Be Transparent

No matter what you do, some employees will only be satisfied if they know that they’re working towards a promotion. Rather than dangling the carrot and never delivering, you should be 100% transparent on how much room for progression there is. That way, if an employee wants to stay, they know what they’re getting themselves into.

Employee retention rates are one of the most difficult aspects of recruitment. To keep hold of your employees, you need to provide personal and professional development. You can do this by regular feedback, celebrating excellence, training staff, and allowing opportunities for networking. There are many more employee retention strategies than those listed above. However, if you take on the advice above, you are on to a great start.

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Author Bio: This article is written by our marketing team at HR Cloud. HR Cloud is a leading provider of HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee engagement, and intranet software. Our aim is to help your company improve employee engagement, employee productivity, and to save you valuable time!