It’s no secret that recruiting talent is crucial to the success of an organisation, but it can sometimes feel like an uphill battle retaining it. Let’s explore some ways to attract and retain talent.
As a Business Development Manager, I have the privilege of meeting a variety of clients and organisations, big and small, across multiple sectors every day. One of the biggest challenges which is presented to me, time and time again, is employee retention.
High staff turnover is one of the highest cost factors for any business. Marry that with the growing importance of personal development, low employee engagement, and slashed training budgets, it can sometimes seem like a tall ask to meet everyone’s expectations, whilst running and managing your business.
Companies that are actively interested and dedicated in their employees’ careers see significantly lower absenteeism rates, higher productivity levels, an overall positive company culture, and most importantly decrease that staff turnover.
The right training attracts top talent
Now it’s not all about the employees you already have but also important to consider those in which you want to hire. Including a personal development offering in a job positing will improve your chances of standing out against your competition, fostering loyalty, and attracting more applicants.
Studies show that the most common reason a person leaves an organisation is the same reason someone joins it: personal development. An engaged workforce will achieve an almost 60% lower staff turnover rate, so once you get them onboard it’s imperative that you execute their learning and development journey straight away.
What is personal development?
Without a doubt your employees are your biggest asset, and whilst you may think you’re investing heavily in them, for example providing workplace perks such as recreation activities, food and coffee, flexible work schedules or gym memberships, investing in employee training and development is vital to sustainable business growth and success.
Employee training and development involves programmes which enable employees to learn precise skills or knowledge to improve on the job performance. This personal growth plan not only ensures future productivity, performance and job satisfaction but empowers employees to repay opportunity and remain with a company.
94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development.
The benefits of workforce development
Employee advocacy – employees who feel empowered and appreciated within the workplace will be more effective at influencing fellow peers, encouraging them to also invest in a company. Creating a knowledge-sharing environment encourages employees to share what they have learned with others and vastly improves your organisation’s internal expertise.
Top tip: To use employee advocacy to your advantage you should share success stories of career transformation on your company’s LinkedIn page, asking your employees past and present to describe how they’ve used learning to transform their careers at your organization, moved into leadership roles or developed new skills for success. Employees are the biggest stewards of your culture and your most valuable business resource.
Increased workplace engagement – dedicated training and development fosters employee engagement, and reduces feelings of boredom, dissatisfaction, and a negative working environment.
Reduced workplace accidents – workgroups that are engaged prevents workplace idleness and prevents on the job accidents or incidents. Employees become problem solvers as they learn how to be creative and innovative, therefore enabling them to confidently take on new tasks, learning from past mistakes and developing critical thinking skills that enable your team to resolve issues more easily.
Moulding future leads – there is nothing more motivating for an employee than feeling invested in whilst working in a role. Acquiring leadership potential can start from the initial acquisition, so targeting skills and employees for future leadership should always be a consideration with your workforce development programmes. Having such programmes shows that your company is always willing to promote in-house talent, instead of outsourcing new staff.
What to do next
The main drive for employee development from a business perspective is to shape a more efficient, competitive, and engaged workforce. It sounds quite straight forward when you put it like that, but in truth, designing a personal development plan for all your members of staff is a big task, as everyone learns in different ways, at different paces and at different times.
3t Transform have all the tools to help deliver the perfect learning and training strategy and can work with you to create a high-impact employee training plan.
Here’s some things to consider:
Create a strategic development plan – it’s not all about creating a development plan which benefits your employees, you should begin with establishing your business goals. Ask yourself, what business factors and objectives do we hope to impact through training and what skills are needed within the business to align with those overall objectives.
Personalise your employee development – you can’t approach workplace development with a “on size fits all” mentality. Employees need to be analysed and acknowledged in terms of their specific skills and different approaches to learning.
Research indicates that adopting a blended learning approach to your L&D programme, consisting of a combination of digital-learning technology and in-person sessions suits the needs of modern-day learners. Blended learning provides continuous learning opportunities over a plethora of learning platforms, such as E-learning, video, virtual reality and augmented reality to name a few, that take place over a flexible period of time, to suit the needs of your employees.
Think about gamification – using gamification is a great way to increase engagement with training. Achieved through points, badges, leaderboards, and levels, you can set it up, so your learners are being rewarded for taking training, therefore motivating them to reach goals and complete their courses. It creates a little healthy competition in your company too.
Invest in an LMS – delivering your learning is a vital piece of the puzzle, so investing in software which can help you streamline this will help massively.
The Transform LMS enables you to either upload your pre-existing training courses or create new ones. When training your employees, you can conduct employee assessments, particularly for compliance training and quizzes, within the software, so that you check your employees’ understanding of their courses and reinforce the key takeaways, assess learner performance, and collate invaluable feedback from surveys, enabling you to make improvements.
Employee turnover is a universal issue that every industry faces but having a skilled and long-serving workforce can take your business to great heights. The longer the tenure of an employee at a company, the more productive their work becomes over time and the more engaged they remain.