If you want to keep your staff happy and productive, you need to consider employee growth. More than half of the employees in a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center said they quit their job because there were no opportunities for advancement. The good news is there are a lot of ways you can promote employee growth in your organization, and we’ll take a look at some of them in this article.
What Is Employee Growth and Its Benefits?
Employee growth is the development of new skills, knowledge and capacity. It allows your team to engage with and learn new practices to help them perform their jobs better and set them on a career development path that aligns with their goals.
Creating a path to growth can help improve employee engagement, foster loyalty, reduce absenteeism and increase productivity. It’s also important for employee retention. In 2022, 50.6 million Americans left their jobs, the highest number in the history of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ JOLTS survey.
One of the main reasons for leaving a job is not being given professional development opportunities. A company culture that promotes employee growth and development can insulate you from the Great Resignation and build a more skilled and productive staff that will pay dividends.
How to Increase Employee Growth Opportunities
Providing growth opportunities for your employees is essential to happy and productive staff, but what does growth opportunities mean? It means giving your employees a chance to build their skills and expertise, and there are plenty of ways to do it. You can do anything from providing webinars to holding a series of workshops as a way to help employees grow. No matter the level of employees, you can set them on a solid career development path from the moment they join your company.
Create Excellent Onboarding and Training Processes
You’ve used the best job sites to hire someone. Now, it’s time to onboard and train them. Employees are the most engaged during the first three months on the job because they are meeting people, learning skills and facing challenges they have not yet encountered, but only 12% of employees believe their organization does a great job of onboarding. To do it best, make sure your company’s culture is expressed from the start. Give employees 12 to 15 months to onboard and let new staff know there is career growth opportunity with your company.
Kickstart Individual Employee Development Plans
One way you can foster the growth of employees is to help them identify skill gaps and create a plan to close them. Development plans will look different for individual employees, depending on their assets and career goals. It’s important to find employees who are eager to grow and build their leadership skills. Working together to get them started on their career path early will help keep them motivated and aligned with the workplace’s goals. You should review development plans periodically as you discover new areas of growth of employees.
Encourage Having a Growth Mindset
A growth mindset is when employees believe their limitations don’t limit them because they know they can improve. Encouraging this attitude can lead to growth within a company in the long run. Employees are more likely to trust each other and morale improves. You can enable this mindset by tying performance reviews to learning, viewing successes and failures as learning opportunities and supporting your current workforce in their pursuit of valuable skills.
Recognize and Celebrate Individual and Company Wins
A key driver to employee growth is the recognition and celebration of individual successes and the company’s. You can deliver this as bonuses or raises, but there are other ways if you company can’t dole out financial rewards. In fact, sometimes employees prefer non-financial recognition. Try handwritten notes, offering experiences or giving small gifts.
Offer Professional Growth Stipends and Training Opportunities
It can be difficult to provide training resources for all the areas of opportunity for employees. After all, what is an area of growth but a path toward better career outcomes specific to each individual? That’s where growth stipends provide value. Offering employees a professional development stipend allows them to choose a training track that works for their needs while ensuring that their development aligns with your company’s.
Focus on Training Soft Skills
Soft skills have been called the biggest skills gap in the country. Focusing on things such as teamwork, communication and leadership can give your workers transferable skills for any job they take in the company. That means employee growth in these areas can pay off for the whole organization, no matter what level of employees you’re developing.
Provide Feedback and Encourage Workers to Give Feedback as Well
Assessing the impact of training can be hard in the short run if all you’re doing is looking at metrics. The best way to evaluate the success of your development programs is to solicit feedback from your employees. Encourage employee feedback and listen. Additionally, keep an eye on their progress and provide regular feedback yourself.
How to Spot Potentially Challenging Employees When Hiring
Whether you’re still asking what does entry-level mean or you’re a seasoned recruiter, sometimes you’re going to hire a challenging employee. Fortunately, you can prevent it from happening again. If you’re new to hiring, you might need to learn how to find employees and, once you have a pool of viable candidates, how to interview someone. When interviewing, look out for candidates who dodge questions, badmouth their former employers or look unkempt. All of these suggest an employee who’ll cause you grief.
Easily Help Your Employees and Your Business Flourish
When it comes to employee growth, you have a lot of options. You can give small gifts as tokens of recognition, offer a training stipend or promote a growth in workplace mindset. Whatever you choose, taking steps to promote development opportunities is a win-win. Your employees will be more engaged, motivated and productive, and your company will reap the rewards.
Originally a test article written in 2023. Published here for archival and portfolio purposes.