6 Employee Development Examples to Keep Your Team Engaged
Looking for high-impact employee development examples? Here are six real-world talent development examples for enhancing your workforce’s skills and capabilities.
The talent development side of HR is getting complicated.
We’re expected to equip the workforce with rapidly advancing skills. Get young employees up to speed. Find and cultivate employees with leadership potential. Transfer knowledge between generations. Close demographic gaps from underrepresented segments. And more.
Safe to say, this is a time for enacting high-powered employee development examples. We have six development strategy examples coming straight from the business world.
1. Connect them with supportive mentors
Mentors are invaluable for getting ahead. A good mentor shares experiential knowledge, provides direction, and lets us tap their social capital. They offer support, insight, and a touch of coaching.
Outlier individuals, like Tony Robbins, Steve Jobs, and Martin Luther King Jr. all had mentors. Outlier companies do the same. 100% of Fortune 50 companies have mentoring programs, while 84% of Fortune 500 companies do.
Mentorship is an effective employee development idea, even for organizations with thousands of workers.
One of those is Sodexo, a food services and facility management multinational with a diverse frontline workforce. Its Spirit of Mentoring employee development plan provides effective, niched-down support.
If you want to strengthen your company’s knowledge transfer, social exchange, and talent development, use an employee engagement app to facilitate these connections.
2. Create employee journey-based internal training programs
Internal training programs target specific learning outcomes and can be used to help with onboarding, train employees for new roles, navigate through organizational change, and simply to cultivate a more competent workforce. You can help employees improve role-specific competencies or soft skills, like time management and communication skills.
These are used everywhere from tech startups, like Netflix, which built internal training into its growth model, to large corporations like Walmart.
Working at Walmart is the retail giant’s robust internal training division. Walmart uses it to equip its frontline associates with critical, future-ready capabilities.
Walmart designed each training program to bring a specific group of employees from one stage of work to another. It has programs for high schoolers getting their first taste of work, university students preparing for their careers, young professionals, veterans, military spouses, and full-time retail associates.
You can model the same best practices that Walmart, Netflix, and others use. Just add training material for different team member avatars at various stages of their employee journey into your internal communications app.
3. Guide them into leadership roles
70% of frontline leaders want to develop leadership and management skills within the next year. At the same time, a McKinsey study determined that 70% of frontline employees applied for a career advancement opportunity within the last year, either with their current company or a different one.
But opportunities alone aren’t enough. McKinsey noted that 65% of frontline workers are unaware or unsure of how to achieve them, even more so for women, younger workers, and those without a high school degree.
They have to be guided to participate, develop psychological ownership, and build a new set of professional skills.
Venture Foods integrates employee leadership into its company culture, providing its food service team members with individual development, collaborative learning, and cross-functional advancement opportunities.
The result? Ventura employees feel a stronger sense of ownership, loyalty, and belonging. They engage deeper, actively problem solving and contributing ideas for improving the company and delivering better service.
4. Recognize their learning accomplishments
Being appreciated and recognized for our professional accomplishments matters to all of us.
Recognition increases our motivation and productivity levels. It creates feelings of accomplishment and boosts company loyalty. It’s a low-cost, high-impact way to positively impact your workforce’s psychological functioning and well-being.
Private and public acknowledgment should be integrated into the company culture and tapped into during critical times.
GE leaned on the power of recognition after restructuring its manufacturing site. It highlighted employee performance and achievements on a wall-mounted dashboard, recognized team members in monthly briefs, and created posters with success story snippets.
Put this employee development idea into action if you want to deepen overall engagement and increase productivity.
5. Leverage goal-setting
Goal-setting is a powerful psychological lever, even within the workplace. Empirical research from psychologists Locke and Latham shows that specific and moderately challenging goals increase our task performance and organizational commitment levels.
According to them, goal-setting is further supported when we build feelings of self-efficacy by providing adequate training, access to role models or mentors, supportive communication, and feedback on progress.
Done right, we can easily get our learners 4 times more likely to engage with the program.
You can incorporate goal-setting with other employee development ideas. Altria Group does this by helping its entry-level staff career plan. Its team members discover what options are available and set career goals. Managers then determine which skills are needed and set them up with the requisite talent development programs.
So, break your employee development ideas down into actionable goals. Then use an employee engagement app to help employees set goals, manage tasks, receive resources, connect with mentors, and track their progress.
6. Run a skills gap analysis
So, how do you know which employee development ideas to implement first? Should you focus on building basic interpersonal skills or can your employees handle a job rotation program that builds management skills?
The only way to be certain is by identifying the skills gap - aka the difference between the competencies your company requires and those its employees possess.
If you aren’t sure what those are, run a skills gap analysis to find out. This is a two-part process.
- Discover what skills, competencies, and capabilities the organization relies on or needs to grow. If the company has an updated skills taxonomy, simply review it. Otherwise, ask leaders, managers, and employees what those are. Also check performance reviews, exit interviews, and safety records for unmet skills.
- Discover which skills, competencies, and capabilities it already has. Check HR records to see how skilled current team members are, look into the current job market to see what skills the best candidates have, and analyze adjacent skill needs.
Get through this assessment by leveraging internal communication tools like surveys and polls.
Employee development programs for today’s workforce
These employee development ideas are based on extensive psychological research and tested pedagogical principles. Not to mention, they’re already used by successful organizations, like Walmart, Netflix, and Sodexo.
You can get mentoring, employee journey-based training programs, recognition, and goal-setting into action with a mobile-first employee app. It puts access to learning and growth opportunities in each employee’s hands.
It will also help you create a stellar holistic employee experience. Learning and development is one part of their journey. Other phases like onboarding and the day-to-day experience are just as critical to their experience, performance, and outcomes.
Want to know what those are? Then take a look at the six stages of the employee experience journey.