How employee development can boost company culture and retention

We can underestimate employee development plans to our detriment. Research shows that, should business leaders take their eye off the ball, people will leave. Four in 10 Gen Zs and a quarter of millennials would like to leave their jobs within two years, according to Deloitte research. 33% of UK employees say they would leave their job because of a lack of career progression.

Employees know their value too. A World Economic Forum (WEF) study says: ‘Workers with specialised training are in high demand – and they know it.’

Despite the sobering research findings and survey results, employers are perhaps guilty of not recognising the problem, nor doing enough to remedy it. Business Leader findings show that 81% of UK employees have no written career plan in place with their employer. The evidence clearly points to people wanting career progression, or else they will leave to find an alternative career solution.

Employees want to grow, develop and improve. This represents an opportunity for organisations to offer career development as a substantial job benefit. This could help retention, as well as play a part in strengthening company culture.

The WEF survey concludes that companies ‘must tailor their workforce strategy to the unique needs of their workers’. This is what we’ll discuss in this article, focusing on why employee development is key to retention.

A five-step employee development plan

If the maxim is true that employers should hire for potential, not experience, then the emphasis for helping employers realise their potential is with the employer. A 2019 Gartner survey found that only 29% of new hires have all the skills required for their current roles. Expecting everybody to be able to run from day one is perhaps unrealistic.

So, how do business leaders hire for potential and not experience? The first step is to …

Know what the business wants to achieve and plan for it

Before we know how to grow as employers and employees, the organisation we work for needs to have goals and objectives. Without targets, we may wander aimlessly without knowing our purpose, or why we do the things we do. With objectives, a business can provide direction, and it is with goals and direction that we can measure the success of our endeavours.

Business goals might be increasing revenue or market value, improving customer service or brand visibility, being more competitive, or improving employee experience to boost retention. Whatever the goals look like, they are sometimes set using the SMART method. The UK’s Chartered Management Institute (CMI) provides a breakdown of SMART, which may be helpful in formulating organisational objectives.

Whether the SMART method is used or not, we recommend including employees as much as possible during the process of setting business objectives. Business leaders who don’t listen to employees (join the 66% of UK companies who aren’t good listeners) may lose out on valuable feedback and ideas.

Employee development plan – the second step

Once organisational goals are established, it should become easier to evaluate employees relative to the business objectives. Business leaders may look to see what strengths can be leveraged, as well as where individuals or teams could improve through training. This is an essential phase of a successful employee development plan: business objectives aligning neatly with individual objectives and vice versa.

The BBC reports that employers are increasingly considering soft skills when it comes to recruiting new prospects. This approach may be beneficial for current employee development plans, too. With more emphasis on flexible working, and the technology that enables businesses to be more adaptable, collaboration and critical thinking skills are also worth developing.

Step three, where the employee development plan is refined

With the business objectives set and the evaluation phase of aligning needs considered, it’s tempting to sit on our hands and see what happens. A better plan of action is to drill down even further into aligning the objectives on the table. How can business leaders help employees reach their individual goals and do so in the best interests of the business? How can the business do a better job of creating an environment of mutual growth?

The answers to these questions are not in this article. Instead, they form part of the specific, tailored journey each organisation embarks upon. Leaders may find it helpful to focus on employee empowerment to bolster culture; one of the best ways to achieve this is to trust employees and remove their fear of failure. Discuss their individual development needs regularly. Coach them. Provide training. Strive to help employees succeed.

Step four, where the employee development action happens

With so much time and thought put into the objectives deep-dive, it may come as a relief to finally put the plan into action. This is the stage where organisations research, plan, organise and deliver the training and coaching required to meet everybody’s goals and objectives.

The role and leadership skills of managers is all-important in ensuring the training is well-prepared and relevant. It’s also important to generate enthusiasm and willingness, so inertia or resistance to change doesn’t creep in. For instance, a CBI report says a key factor in the UK’s sluggish productivity growth is the inertia of 70% of employers to adopt available new technology.

Step five, where regular reviews make all the difference

The final step in this short, yet powerful employee development plan is to follow up, follow up and follow up some more. Review progress regularly. We can’t emphasise this enough. The temptation to rest assured the employee development strategy will take care of itself is enticing, but it’s a misguided approach. Apathy, wherever it originates, may contribute to a toxic workplace culture, which is 10 times more likely to be the reason people quit.

The solution is to evaluate progress in areas of training and development, and measure against organisational goals. Constantly realign objectives and expectations to stay on course. The hard truth is that simply providing an expensive array of career development tools means nothing if no one uses them. In fact, despite 55% of UK employers doing just this, less than half of employees make use of them.

This point to the importance of regular and consistent review processes. We may even consider this final step to be the most important of all. After all, without it, the four steps that come before are almost redundant.

The outcomes: improve company culture and reduce churn rates

If organisations seek to retain employees, it’s vital they do so with employee development strategies in mind. It may be the one outlined above, or perhaps another approach that leads to the same result: improved company culture and a reduction in employee churn rates.

Staff churn is costly, but to counter the anxieties shared by 74% of CEOs (according to a PwC Global CEO Survey) around not having available talent to grow as a business, an employee development plan is crucial.

By creating an environment of care, a business can go a long way to nurturing a desirable culture where people want to work, and more importantly want to stay.