A recent survey conducted by the global talent management company Lumesse found that over 40% of HR leaders admitted to not being able to provide effective training to ensure that employees have the right skillset. As an HR professional, one of your most critical tasks is to provide training to employees—not only to keep them around, but also to elevate your company to the next level.
When a human resources department is stretched thin, it’s not easy to provide the necessary training for all employees. We’ve created a list of things that’ll help boost your training program, and maybe even take some of the responsibilities off your HR department.
Mentorship: One of the biggest ways to provide real and personal training is to set employees up with mentors. Not only does mentorship provide employees with a supportive ear for new ideas or concerns they may have, but it also gives them access to someone who has most likely been in their shoes before. This type of training might not work in the retail environment, due to the volume of employees, but in a more closely-knit professional office it works like a charm. Mentorship provides skills that can’t be learned from one-day training seminars or workplace programs.
Promotions: One of the most radical ways to provide employees with training is by giving them a promotion. If they show promise and dedication, put them in a role where they are forced to learn and grow as an employee. This type of training is a “sink or swim” method, but it can be quite effective. It’ll allow you to see how well an employee handles work pressures. If they swim, they’ll become better candidates for future promotions and mentorship programs. With appropriate coaching, a promotion can definitely be seen as a positive form of employee development.
Coaching: A more casual approach to mentoring is encouraging managers to adopt a coaching approach. Instead of criticizing shortcomings and creating a negative experience, managers can adopt a more positive approach to train and better employees. If your company has a benchmark for how employees should be performing in certain areas, this will work a lot better for you. When an employee performs under what you would consider acceptable, “coach” them on how they might improve their performance. This not only serves as training and gives the employee feedback on how to improve, but it also allows managers to keep better track of employee development and see trends in their behavior over a time.
Intercompany Transfers: If you’re looking to provide your employee with training in a variety of fields, transfer them to another department to learn the ropes. This has worked well for numerous companies. If an employee has the potential to go further in their career, cross-training or transferring is a great way for them to develop at least a basic understand of how each department operates. Transferring potential management candidates to a different department will help them gain face recognition as well as knowledge and insight.
If you’re having trouble keeping up with training within your organization, try a few of these suggestions and see if things improve. The best one to implement on this list is mentorship, because it allows for direct, one-on-one training with a senior level executive. This will go a long way toward developing the strong, well-trained employees you’ll need in order to grow as a company.
Our webinar will show you how to use dynamic training and accurate testing to better educate and assess your employees, increase productivity and retention, improve the skills of current and future applicants, lower employee attrition by up to 50 percent and discover budding “rock star” employees.
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4 Comments
I’m all about training and providing your employees with the tools to face future challenges. But I fail to see the point you make when talking about promotions as a way to force your employee to learn things. The mentality swim or sink is not one that we should see, because it’s all good if they swim, but what if they sink? What do you do then? Are you ready to tank your business just because you decided to test an employee’s skills in running a project?
Coaching sounds like the real deal to me. Being able to have the managers close to the employees, putting them on the right road when they stray, and getting to know their workforce better, with individual strengths and weaknesses, that’s a great way to predict success for future projects.
Apart from the promotion advice that I don’t quite agree with, the other things should happen without somebody asking specifically for them. Coaching programs from the managers should be mandatory, mentorship should be as well, especially for new hires, while intercompany transfers don’t apply to a lot of companies, as there are not so many that are so big, but should work. And by the way, don’t promote somebody hoping they will swim and train on the job, and won’t drown. It’s bad for the business and for the employee as well.
Having once been placed in a position that I was not adequately trained for, I can vouch first-hand that nothing is more stressful and frustrating than being asked to perform duties when you don’t know what you are doing. It’s bad for the company and terrible for employee morale. This is especially frustrating to an employee who truly takes pride in his/her work. Training is vital if you want satisfied employees and clients. A good mentor will be there when the trainee needs a quick answer to resolve an issue, but they will also hold the trainee accountable to learn the job in a timely manner.