Leveraging Employee Development Plan For Improved Productivity

Where brands often focus on ROI, what they fail to realize is that the buck stops with their employees. ROI is productivity-based, and going by the transformations we are witnessing in the global business setting, it becomes imperative that your employees must be adaptable, an employee development plan ensures that you keep on innovating and thinking about the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought dramatic changes to the ways business operations were conducted. Organizations are talking about digital transformation, but how do you go into that without skilled employees? What developmental plans do you have in place to ensure that your employees give the necessary value?

The business world is daily becoming more consumer-centric, and your employees must know that and be refocused on ensuring that without customer satisfaction, the business packs up. According to a report by Gallup, only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged. 

What this means is that your employees are ready to leave whenever a better opportunity surfaces. The surprising thing is that employees are ready to undergo development training, but sometimes organizations are not willing to give them the opportunity. 

Employee development plan statistics

According to LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report 2019, 94% of employees say they are willing to stay put in an organization that values the acquisition of better skills and invests in their development plan. If you think your employees are only interested in their pay packets, this is a big revelation. 

They want to improve and if you are not ready to offer them the opportunity to become better in what they do, they leave at the next opportunity, this may not be in your best interest as the competition for talent is becoming stiffer. Where you may believe that you are building up the employees for their proficiency, an employee development plan will go a long way to improve your organizational culture, productivity, employee retention, engagement, customer experience, and, ultimately, organizational successes.

Taking a look at what we have today, the business environment has seriously undergone a dramatic change, the COVID-19 pandemic ensured that it’s no longer business as usual, you must seek out your customers where they are and at their own time. You need better-equipped employees, the world is going through series of digital transformations, and you must ensure that your employees can adapt to the new technologies that are relevant to the changes.

Collaboration tools, AI, machine learning, software systems, and applications are becoming very necessary in the conduct of businesses. Even your legacy systems must be revamped and all of these require training, which necessitates an employee development plan. 

Your employees have become accustomed to the culture of the organization; in the light of digital transformations, you need to change their attitudes. They must understand the need for a new digital culture, and this is only feasible with a development plan.

What is the need for an employee development plan?

The most obvious reason is to improve productivity. Apart from that, if you have a plan in place to develop your employees, it gives you the leverage to compete favorably in the market. 

Employees are happy when they realize they are becoming better than when they were engaged. It gives them opportunities for promotion and better pay packets. 

An employee who has acquired active training has the assurance of being retained by the organization. It confers job security. When you have an active employee development plan in place, your employees have no reason to seek more challenging projects, they feel satisfied and more fulfilled. 

They realize their values are increasing and will want to put in their best. An employee that has acquired additional training is on the pedestal for managerial duties and a part of the decision-making body of the organization. 

Ensuring that your employees receive further training on the job does not come easy, it takes a lot of input and financial resources, however, the end justifies the means.

These are a few employee development plans that your brand may consider worthwhile:

1. Performance-based plan

This development plan works based on what obtains in schools. Every student wants to pass and proceed to the next grade or graduate from the school, but the fact is that only those who work very hard come up with As. 

Students that have very good grades are recognized especially by their schools. Most times, they are given awards and scholarships for their hard work.

Applying this to your organization, you can set out goals for your employees. If they understand that they will be rewarded for excellence, they are more enthusiastic in embarking on training. 

While you can easily measure students’ performances with different examinations, the case for employees is not so clear-cut. You may need KPIs and different metrics to quantify employees’ output and rate of development when using a performance-based professional development plan in your organization.

An employee performance-based development plan works more in the line of the feed-forward review, where you give your employees training, suggestions, recommendations, and encouragement on how to become more productive and handle customer complaints in the future in a more professional way.

2. Management by objectives

You don’t have all the time in the world, the competition is there, and probably, stakeholders are clamoring for their dividends, you must think out of the box. The situation may call for an employee development plan that is short time-based. When you need shorter-term goals, you need management by objectives. 

This employee development plan allows employees to set their targets rather than depending on what the management has set out, they believe they have set their targets and are more willing to achieve them. They have a development plan that they see as proactive instead of reactive. 

They can modify their goals with time, they know when they are scoring and hitting the target, they are the judge in this case. This is based on self-evaluating, and nothing beats an employee who has decided to self-improve.

3. The need for succession in managerial levels 

The managerial level cannot subsist forever; employees come and employees go, the managerial level is very important in decision-making and if the culture of the organization must be maintained, there is the need to train and develop those who will take over the helm of affairs. 

Succession planning is the employee development plan where you have a career ladder in place, the training ensures that as your C-suite is maybe becoming more professional and tending towards bigger objectives, employees who are lower on the ladder become better suited to take over. It ensures that there are no lapses; it prepares employees who are lower on the ladder for more senior roles with time.