How to actually develop employees, instead of just lip-servicing it
By: Ted Bauer
Tags: Employee Experience, Work, Future Of Work, Management And Leadership, Employee Development

One of the big problems with conventional employee development is that it’s pretty one-size-fits-all and cookie-cutter. Why is this a problem? Well, if you’re training 15 people in a room, they’re going to be different. Some ways?

Gender

Race

Origin

Job in company

Years of experience

Family composition

Connection/passion for specific industry

Etc.

And yet, oftentimes, this is what we do: put 15 people in a room, despite those differences, and train ’em up the same way.

Why do we do this? Because it’s easier and more cost-effective, and that’s ultimately what the company cares about. The notion of “employee development” is a thing we say matters, but how much it actually matters varies greatly by company.

This doesn’t leave us in a good place.

What do you mean?

Check out these stats:

In a 2014 survey, 55% of executives said a major constraint to investing in training was that they did not know how to measure success. Almost half (49%) said that it was difficult to ensure a return on investment (ROI). And in another survey, 87% said they cannot calculate quantifiable returns on their learning investments.

Just think about that: 87% of people can’t determine ROI on something, even though “determining ROI” is literally all that matters to decision-makers evaluating spend. You see now why most learning and development departments are considered a joke by the bigwigs?

If you approached an exec and said “There’s a 87 percent chance we won’t know whether this works,” well, I hope your LinkedIn is up to date. Job search time! But yet, this is exactly what’s happening.

Why is it happening?

Two main reasons:

L&D often resides in HR. It’s not revenue-facing. The people with clout do not care as much as they normally would. Work is about execution. That’s how you scale, that’s how you get promoted, etc. Things like “learning” and “thinking” have no true role.

OK, so how do we make it better?

Let’s start by thinking about this in terms of data.

Maybe you have some data around 1 or more of the following topics:

Turnover

Hiring/recruiting costs

Project completion/successful projects

Revenue generated per employee

What you want to do is start mapping “These are skills people need” (employee development) and “This is why people leave” (turnover).

Now what you want to do is set up a training whereby the necessary skills are tied to the potential challenges.

An employee development example

Let’s say you know the №1 cause of turnover is relationship with manager. (This is common.) You go deeper and find that the №1 issue in managerial relationships is communication. (This is also common.) So now you know that employee development — at both the managerial and execution level — needs to have some focus on communication.

But you don’t want to cookie-cutter it, so go talk to people and figure out what needs to be involved in the training experience. For example:

Specific challenges in the past 30 days

Role plays

Modeling

What to do when ________ (multiple situations)

Normally in these situations you’d get managers bellowing “I need executors who listen and do what I say!” and employees saying “I just want to be treated like a decent human being,” but … that kind of feedback can still inform what the employee development experience can look like.

… and that’s the bottom line!

If you truly believe that we live and work in the Knowledge Economy, well, hate to break this to you but … uh … er … you need to actually develop knowledge in your workers. I know it’s often easy to dismiss as a “HR thing” — you have products to roll out and leads to nurture, of course — but it actually has huge revenue ties if you do this right and don’t just half-ass it. Makes sense, right? Smarter, more connected, more engaged employees probably (a) work harder and (b) treat customers better. People who have no path to development or growth or knowledge ultimately don’t give a shit. As they look for a new job — which can take upwards of a year — they’re phoning it in for you. Isn’t that, uh, a bad thing?

Anything else you’d add on employee development?