A better engaged employee in an enterprise is better placed to drive its learning and developmental initiatives. It works both ways for employers and employees. For an employee, keen on doing well for him or her, as well as an organisation, an upward moving learning curve often runs parallel to that of development. It is an encouraging sign for any business set up.
Engaging for success
But, there are more aberrations to such an ideal scenario than one can think of – employees’ learning not often matching with the job requirements of an organization. That’s why employees’ engagement matters so much in a successful business. And, there are statistics to drive home the point.
Statistics tell it all
· A study has pointed out that over 80 per cent of young employees who have just started out in their career see development critical to their engagement.
· The study further maintains that more than 40 per cent of employees tend to leave their respective organisations within 5 years of joining it in the absence of poor training and scarce development opportunities.
· High ranking organisations are five times more likely to have a highly engaged workforce in learning and development processes.
Motivate employees
There are many ways to keep employees constructively engaged in an organization. They need to be constantly motivated and passionate about remaining engaged. This calls for specific employees-centric strategies. There are numerous ways of keeping employees effectively and gainfully engaged in an organization.
Keeping employees engaged
Maintaining a close watch on employees’ progress during learning or training instills a sense of belonging among them. Many organisations leave their employees to fend for themselves during training. The trainer comes to the class room, distributes handouts, quickly rushes through the material and then you have tea and brief exchanges and that’s it. This neither helps the learner nor organization and it’s a drain on resources as well.
Learning for skilling
Learning is an essential move towards skilling, an essential exercise for maximizing profitability and equipping the workforce for a wide array of roles. Incorporation of an appropriate learning management system goes a long way in ensuring learners engagement. It enables learners to have control over the learning process and knowledge gained. Both employees and employers get to know as to where they stand in terms of achieving learning and development goals and set new revised objectives for success in business.
Incentives important
Incentive or reward or appreciation for work is glue that sticks employees formidably around the common objectives of organizational goals and achievement of long term success. It not only works as a great motivation but also gives a boost to their self esteem.
Using technology for engagement
How much do you enjoy learning while working? Factors such as massive size of course, complex learning system, dull trainers often make employee’s engagement in learning and development a gargantuan task. Use of technology alleviates learners’ suffering by making training or the learning process a fruitful engagement. Modern gadgets such as smart-phones, tablets and engagement through social media platforms, ‘gamification’ tools, e-learning, simulation learning, etc. are great ways of making learning an easy-to-deliver and fun-filled experience.
Tailor-made learning content
Explaining poor application of on-job learning, employees often blames it on the learning content. They also say the learning material is either to lengthy or too difficult to understand. Result is – employees are either over trained or not trained for their specific job roles. It is thus important to have a tailor-made learning and development strategy best suited to workers’ learning goals for their optimum engagement in the day to day business processes.
Key to business success
From a larger perspective, employees’ effective engagement in any learning and development strategy forms the key to your business success. In the words of Kim Edwards, ‘Talent and Leadership Development Manager’ at Getty Images, in a workplace engagement employees are ‘at the center of everything.’ An employee-centric learning and development engagement thus is at the core of a modern work set up. Nothing can be truer than this.