Signs You Should Rethink Your Employee Development Strategy

The single biggest differentiator between successful companies is not always the product or the technology stack nor is it stellar marketing campaigns. It’s the people. The people build the company and are the engine of the ship which keeps it afloat both during calm weather and rough storms.

In the economical side of things, the ‘people factor’ is referred to as human capital, which is a resource that organizations leverage to drive growth.

How do successful organizations leverage their ‘people factor’ to drive growth and set new records? Short answer; Human Capital Development.

What is Human Capital Development?

Human Capital Development is the effort taken by an organization to train and upskill its employees who will, in turn, contribute to the growth in the company with the expertise gained.This development comes in different forms but has traditionally been in the form of training, seminars, and workshop.

Why Is Human Capital Development Important?

As we have established, the need for a skilled pool of employees will add value to the organization in terms of productivity, growth, and revenue generation. Organizations with crème of the crop employees always see maximum returns in growth.

As an entrepreneur or business owner, depending on your level of growth, you would need people to come in and handle different parts of your business while you tend to other affairs.On that note, why then do most businesses struggle to invest in their employees?

Billionaire Entrepreneur, Richard Branson says that “your customers come second and your employees come first”. A direct contradiction to the ‘customer is king’ trope.

If you are yet to start actively investing in your employees, here are some signs that should make you reconsider.

1. Your employees lack the motivation to learn

It’s been acknowledged that a business with lazy employees will not stand the test of time, but lazy employees and unmotivated employees are not in the same category.

Lazy equals unwilling to work even though they know what is expected of them.

Unmotivated employees on the other hand are employees who are struggling to keep up. Either due to a knowledge gap or an overbearing workload or they may be disgruntled due to a lack of compensation for their efforts.

We would like for you to consider this Employee Performance framework which is inspired by Experienced Salesman Simon Bowen.

Now on this performance metric, you have four types of employees:

The Prisoner
- No Passion and No skill as a result
The Rookie
-Passionate about the job but lacks skill
The Voyager
- Skilled employee but lacks passion for the job
The A Player
- Skilled employee who is also passionate about the job

We need no magician to tell us that every employer would like to hire the A Player and would like for their current team to all be A Players.

But for this context, we would focus on the Rookie and Prisoner tropes.Both employees lack the skill needed for growth but one is passionate and has learning motivation while one does not.

You would agree that no employee stays a rookie forever and will grow into expertise with time but how about a prisoner? How can you as an employer infuse learning motivation into employees who can be classified with this prisoner trope.

You would recall that Human Capital Development involves upskilling of employees both in hard and soft skills, and confidence in one’s self and the company’s mission is a soft skill.

According to an in-depth research report conducted by Digital Commons, the employee’s learning motivation is linked to 4 Psychological factors: Hope, Optimism, Efficacy and Resilience.

All of which are qualities that top performing employees possess. So, if an employer observes that their staff are underperforming and are failing to upskill, rather than fire and rehire, that employer can hire a professional trainer that can help move their employees from Prisoner and Rookie mode to A Players.

As a business owner, it is your duty to reframe the way you approach employee development, as opposed to the regular firing squad, you can solicit feedback concerning the work environment and factors responsible for employee drawback.

Investing in employees means investing in other humans like yourself, and for employees to function, the mental and physical well beings should be accounted for.

The second sign would be

2. Your Employee Churn is high

And you keep wishing for “Competent talent”.It is tempting to believe that the reason you cannot find competent people to drive growth for your business is because they are rare.

While this might be true, there may also be the reality that the expectations set do not match the talent available. In this case, what happens is that people are brought in and expected to figure everything out on their own and when they don’t it leads to churn in 3–6months.

Then the cycle of hire and fire begins anew. Most small businesses do not have what is required to attract top talent. Top talent will most times work with a bigger competitor that will pay more and offer better structure.

A survey conducted by PWC on MSMEs in Nigeria highlights the complaints of business owners that say once their talent became really competent, they always left.

However, every talented player was once a junior that was given multiple opportunities to work, fail and add value. Competence is created over time, not manufactured.

So rather than wish for more competent staff, you should consider creating room for your existing ones to achieve the level of competence you desire.

Now having read through all this, we believe your perspective has somewhat been reframed to understand your employees a lot better and see Human Capital Development differently.

Now it’s not enough that we show you roadblocks in your human capital development plan, we would also propose solutions because that’s what we’re all about at Spurt!