The business environment today is challenging, to say the least. Executives have numerous balls in the air and are concentrating hard to make sure they don’t drop any, including customer experience, product development, and balancing your finances. Unfortunately, among all these many important issues, that of talent management can get overlooked.
The truth is that your employees are the single most important element in a successful business. They are the ones who drive innovation, build a relationship with prospects and customers, and deliver excellent customer experience. If your employees are disengaged, uncertain about their role, and/or confused about your business values, it’s going to impact hard and fast on your bottom line.
All of which means that talent management should be one of the most crucial balls to keep in the air. To be fair, most organizations recognize this. Employee bonding days, wellness programs, and relaxation rooms are becoming normal for large workplaces, and more and more companies are replacing human resource managers with employee experience managers or chief employee experience officers, to underline the importance of talent management.
While there are many tactics at their disposal for improving talent management, employee training is front and center. Here are some of the new ways that HR personnel, employee experience officers, and talent managers in multiple enterprises are applying employee training to develop better talent management.
Changing the focus to human needs, not human resources
In the past, employee training was all about the enterprise. It centered around onboarding, recertification, and training workers to use the tech stack and to be familiar with company workflows.
While these all continue to be important use cases for employee training, many enterprises are shifting focus. They’re developing a greater range of on-demand training programs that offer more choice, so that individuals can select the skills and capabilities that they’re interested in developing.
Enterprises taking this approach find that they can still close their skills gaps, while also paying attention to their employees’ personal talents, interests, and curiosity. Employee training that emphasizes the human employee, rather than the labor resource, shows employees that they are more than just another worker.
Empowering workers with control over their careers
Tech advances enable companies to offer on-demand, employee-led training programs that empower workers to make their own choices. With AI, enterprises can offer individualized training at scale, so employees can choose the pace, topic, and style of their learning.
New employee training programs together with a flexible internal talent marketplace enable employees to decide when to upskill and embrace new challenges, when to improve soft management skills to move up the corporate ladder, and when to move sideways into less demanding roles. It means that workers can find a better work-life balance, adjusting their work responsibilities according to their broader life situation and setting the tempo of their own career.
Building a supportive community
Successful enterprises aren’t just places where people come to work, but cohesive communities where people feel they belong. COVID-19 and the need to support remote working made it harder for companies to maintain a sense of community among employees, but employee training stepped into the breach.
Enterprises offering fun, gamified training programs and employee bonding experiences that promote better relationships between teams and individuals. When people feel connected to the company, they are more likely to feel safe about making suggestions, asking questions, and reporting errors or mistakes.
Additionally, we’re seeing enterprises use AR and VR technology to improve training in soft skills like leadership and communication. As a result, managers are better equipped to spot mental health issues and address them compassionately and effectively, which in turn drives mental health awareness and makes employees feel able to ask for the help they need before it becomes critical.
Helping employees find their fit
A combination of on-demand employee training and powerful internal opportunity marketplaces help employees to discover latent talent as well as developing existing skills. It can take time for someone to find their niche in the working world, especially for multipotentialites who can work successfully in many roles and are among the most valuable talent to retain.
Opportunity marketplaces offer the option of trying out different roles and responsibilities until they find the best fit, while also enabling multi-talented workers to switch between different departments and teams on a project basis, so that they can satisfy their need for variety and change without leaving the company for a new arena.
Communicating shared values
When asked which is the most important factor in choosing a workplace, 42.75% of workers said that an inspirational culture is the top of the list. Enterprises are using employee training to share brand values and help employees connect to the meaning behind the business.
When employees feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves and that their work makes a difference to the business and even the world, it increases motivation and raises employee engagement. Employees are much more likely to bring their all to a task that’s meaningful than if they feel that they are simply earning their paycheck.
Employee training gives new energy to talent management
Talent management is the core of every successful business, and enterprises today are finding news ways to win at it with employee training. By using employee training to advance employees’ personal development, create a supportive community, share brand values, nurture individual talents, enterprises are redefining the work experience and moving towards a more profitable future.
