Utilize the competitive edge of employee-led growth to meet your business goals

If you're looking to be ahead of the curve in your industry, you will want to develop a culture of innovation. You'll undoubtedly want to play an active role in this. But how do you achieve this without completely exhausting yourself?

You offer employee development programs that can give your staff the chance to flourish and develop on your business goals with you.

Employee led growth

If you're looking to attract the best job seekers or retain your current workforce, making professional growth a priority is a fantastic way of reducing staff turnover and helping you engage in performance management in a way that is supportive and not intrusive.

Opening conversations with your staff about how they would like to meet their career goals, rather than imposing your own thoughts, is a sure-fire way of ensuring employee engagement with any development activities you decide to deploy.

As Harvard Business Review has pointed out, the best way to give your employees what they want is to engage in an employee value proposition. Business leaders who utilize this approach tend to proffer employees four things:

• Material offerings
• Continuous learning opportunities
• A sense of purpose aligning with organizational goals
• A feeling of community and connection

It is crucial to combine all of these, instead of focusing merely on one; even the most money-motivated member of your team will benefit from the full combination.

So how can you facilitate this with your staff, giving them a sense of their own agency and using the principles of employee value proposition?

Effective employee development programs

The following are some ideas for how to give your staff that all-important feeling of ongoing development:

1. Job training

It is worth finding out from your workforce what it is they are hoping to develop so that engagement levels with any training you provide are optimal. Whether they are looking to develop technical skills within your industry, for more soft skill development, or if they would benefit from specific leadership development programs, allowing your employees to have a say will shift your company's whole approach to employee development.

It can be a good idea to offer your individual employees their own professional development plans so that everyone is invested in their own personal growth. Employee training need not be one-size-fits-all; remembering that everyone has unique strengths and weaknesses can ensure you help your company develop a well-rounded team.

2. Employee-led training 

Whether you are looking to develop a mentorship program or simply establish a culture of peer learning in your company, peer learning can be a wonderful way for your employees to reinforce their own essential skills.

Employee-led training can also result in more self-directed learning as your employees will be better facilitated when it comes to acknowledging their own areas for development.

You can also foster a sense of community by creating a group activity centered around this, for example, if one person presents and another creates the training materials. This way, you can develop the aid teamwork skills that are so important in so many different fields.

3. Career advancement

If you're looking to keep your staff motivated, there needs to be a sense of staff development within your company. After all, you want to avoid losing your experienced employees to lateral moves to companies offering more career development and promotion to leadership roles.

In emphasizing the career trajectory as an important element of an employee's personal goals, you can ensure they engage with development opportunities that will benefit their performance and, therefore, your company, in the long run.

4. Offer ongoing feedback

In order to progress with employee development plans, your staff need to have a sense of how they are performing. In offering both positive and constructive feedback, you can monitor employee performance and stay on top of the current skill level within your company.

Your staff will benefit from being given a sense of their own achievements within their current roles, enjoying any positive reinforcement that comes from being told they have done their jobs well.

They will also, in the long run, thank you for highlighting areas that are in need of further attention to allow for employee growth. Make sure any advice you give is actionable so it can be taken formatively—always frame feedback as a part of continuous development!

5. Utilize customer feedback

If your business model is largely customer-facing, it makes sense to use technological advancements such as online reviews and surveys to give your employees a sense of how they are performing to your client base.

We are all naturally prone to see ourselves in a more negative light than others do, so your staff are likely to be impressed by the positive impacts they are having with every interaction they engage in daily.

Try Edge

If you are looking to combine feedback and community, providing material and external incentives to motivate your staff, you may find the Edge platform is perfect for your business operations.

Our automated sales contests use Google Reviews to create a leaderboard for your employees to engage with in real time on an easily downloadable app. They can then support each other's successes on the app, creating a sense of community online within your business.

You can set the parameters of the competitions—the material offerings for winners and the time frame to keep everyone best motivated.

Contact us today for a free demo of how the Edge platform can benefit your company, and join over 5,000 businesses that benefit from our software.