Ultimate Guide to Incorporate Employee Development into Your Workplace Culture

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This guide explores the importance of employee development and how your organisation can incorporate it into your workplace culture.

Positive workplace culture is essential to retain and attract new talent. According to company culture stats, 81% of candidates consider company culture before applying for a job.

Many factors contribute to workplace culture, including employee engagement, communication, employee development, etc. In short, the whole employee experience helps to build the company culture.

Employee development is a crucial aspect of building a company culture. According to Gallup, 59% of millennials say learning opportunities are significant for them while applying for a job.

Thus, you should focus on employee development and training to harness a progressive workplace culture. But how do I align employee development with my workplace culture?

Just scroll down to learn all about employee training and company culture.

Why Do You Need to Focus on Employee Development?

Employee development is the process of improving existing employees' skills and knowledge. It is not your standard L&D strategy or mandatory employee training program. It goes beyond scrutinising your employee’s strengths and weaknesses.

Employee development is a data-driven process. It is an analytical process that focuses on individual employees' performance, skills, and other attributes. Based on the data, a customised development program is created to provide mentorship to the existing employees to enhance their abilities.

It is essential to improve employee engagement and productivity in the organisation. Besides this, employee development is vital for:

• Train to handle uncertain situations. Workplaces are full of uncertainties. Due to external or internal factors, your company must regularly deal with several uncertain situations. So, when your employees are trained to handle unexpected situations, this helps to run your business operations smoothly.

• Less complicated recruitment process. You don't have to hire new employees frequently when you can train your existing staff with the required skills. This will reduce your recruitment requirements and enable HR departments to focus on employee engagement and experience. In addition, you can use software like CVViZ, RecruiterFlow, Xobin etc. to hire skilled employees.

• Improve employee loyalty. Training employees using personalised development plans helps to build 1:1 connections. Leadership can learn more about their employees' problems and create a helping culture.

• Saves cost. The cost of training your existing employees is less than recruiting new talent. Hiring new employees includes job posting, interviewing, onboarding training, etc. On the contrary, training existing employees is less time and resource-consuming.

Methods to Incorporate Employee Development into Your Workplace Culture

The Gartner Global Talent Monitor Report states that employee development is a key-driven factor for employees. It says that 40% of employees want to work in an organisation where they get the opportunity to grow.

Therefore, you must incorporate employee development into your workplace culture to create an engaging and motivational environment in your organisation. Here’s how you can include employee development and training programs in your company culture:

Define Company Culture to Your Employees

Do your employees know that you have incorporated employee development into your company culture? No. Then how can your employees take advantage of your training program?

So, you should first tell your employees what your company culture includes. In fact, recruiters should explain culture during the recruitment process. This way, you can hire employees who are aware of your company culture and are looking forward to learning and growing in your organisation.

Promoting your culture also helps to attract highly qualified candidates. You can use social media channels or the company's career page to tell your existing and potential employees about your workplace culture.

Conduct a Skill Gap Analysis

Before incorporating an employee development strategy, you should run an internal analysis to know what skills your staff possesses. After that, you can compare your employees' skills with in-demand market skills.

This way, you will know what skills your employees lack, so you can develop a personalised training program to improve those skills.

Suppose you found in your skill gap analysis that female leadership lacks confidence in your organisation. In this case, you can conduct a female empowerment seminar or webinar to boost women leaders’ confidence to support leadership diversity in your company.

Tailor Experiences for Employees

Personalised employee experience is essential to motivate and engage your staff. Recent hiring statistics reveal that a bad hiring experience with a potential employer-led to 58% of job seekers refusing a job offer.

So, you should establish a clear communication line between your employees and senior management. This practice will help you understand what your employees actually want to learn.

When you provide training in the area that interests your employees, they will show more enthusiasm and passion for joining the training program. In fact, you should create a personalised training program for individual employees based on their interest levels.

Make Training Accessible

Design your employee training program so that everyone can easily access it. For example, if you provide on-site training, your remote and hybrid employees will not be able to access it. On the contrary, if you provide only online training, many older employees might find it hard to learn virtually.

Thus, the best solution is to communicate with your employees and provide training in a module that is easily accessible to everyone.

Set a Schedule to Learn

Do you want more employees to participate in employee development and training programs? If so, you have to give them a chance to participate in it.

If you don’t give your employees sufficient free time to learn and grow, they will not show enthusiasm for participating in your training programs. Therefore, you should create a proper schedule for your individual employees so they get at least 2 to 3 hours per week to focus on their skills.

However, if you want employees to learn in their personal time, you have to give them some lucrative benefits.

Implement Various Learning Methods

One learning method will not fit all your employees. Every person has different intelligence levels and learning capacities. Therefore, you cannot create one training program style and expect all your employees to deliver high-quality results.

You should develop learning materials targeting different approaches so that your employees can select the learning method based on their comfort level. For example, you can create video lessons, live training sessions, provide documentation, etc.

Incorporate Learning Into Day-To-Day Activities

The best way to incorporate employee development into your workplace culture is to include learning in the day-to-day activities of your employees. You should not make learning separate from your employees' job profiles. You should make learning a part of your employees' daily routine.

For example, you can make it part of your recruiters' job to learn about new recruitment techniques. You can allow your recruiters to constantly experiment with different recruitment automation solutions to learn and grow.

Make Learning Fun and Social

A classroom environment is the best way to learn and expand your knowledge base. When your employees get a chance to share ideas with their peers and discuss their problems among themselves, it encourages peer learning.

Besides social learning, you should make learning fun and interactive for your employees. For example, you can organise impromptu quizzes, polls, surveys, and live sessions to make training more engaging for your team.

Reward Learning

To give a little push to your employees, you can offer rewards in return for training. You can offer awards like promotion, additional paid leave, or monetary benefits.

Rewards work like a charm to motivate people to do something new. A reward is important when your employees are not enthusiastic about learning new things. It is like a perfect carrot and stick situation where you can encourage your employees to learn with a pinch of reward.

Promote Knowledge Sharing

You don’t need to hire professionals to train your employees. You can ask your employees to share their knowledge and skills among themselves. It is like a mentorship program where one employee will train another.

This strategy will not only save the company's resources. But also improves team culture and trust. You can use mentorship software such as PushFar to build a proper structure to promote knowledge sharing.

Using the software, you can also promote self-awareness in the organisation. Your employees can use software to find the right mentor for themselves and work on their skills.

Provide Instant Feedback

Feedback is an important part of a training program. You should monitor your employees' training progress in real-time and provide them with instant feedback, such as through employee feedback surveys. This allows employees to understand how they can better improve their skills and which learning method is best for them.

In addition, feedback helps managers understand whether a training program is efficient or not. They can even make frequent changes to the training program to drive maximum results.

Make Learning a Continuous Part of the Employee’s Journey

Employee development is not a one-time thing. You cannot stop providing training to your employees at any time. In fact, training is a continuous part of an employee's journey. Throughout an employee's cycle, you should monitor their skills and motivate them to learn new skills to improve their work.

Measure the Impact of Your Learning and Development Investment

You know what they say: what gets measured gets managed. A learning and development strategy needs to include a reliable method for measuring the outcomes, and how your employees experience your different learning and development initiatives.

Learning and development are important drivers of employee engagement, and to know where to invest, you need a comprehensive tool for measuring employee engagement. In order to set realistic goals and understand your results, it can also be very valuable to benchmark your employee engagement data and L&D results against, for example, your industry average.

Parting Remarks

Do you want to build a progressive company culture? Do you want your employees to always show high productivity and performance?

If so, employee development is essential for it. With an effective training culture, you can attract new employees and retain your existing ones. Besides this, learning will help to improve your employees' relationships, strengthen communication flow, and boost your business growth.

So, let’s not waste any more time and start incorporating employee development into your workplace culture now.   

Author Bio

Ankur is the co-founder and CEO of GreenThumbs. He is an HRTech enthusiast and a passionate entrepreneur. By education, Ankur is a Chartered Accountant. In addition to running his company, he is an avid reader and knowledge sponge.