Training *cue melodramatic scary movie theme music & sound effects* — Whether you associate training with sunshine or the apocalypse, effective organizational development provides significant gains to the bottom line of the organization. I’m not talking about a mandatory 3-hour course on how to do your job better. Organizational development does come in different forms; whether it’s a monthly 30-minute meeting with your supervisor to discuss professional objectives or having on-boarding resources for new hires to decrease the time-to-productivity ratio. Regardless of the development initiative, the following 5 best practices should be considered:
1. Employee Development should support organizational goals
As an organization, every function should tie back to the organizational goals — especially development initiatives. The learning objectives can be clearly defined to tie directly back to those organizational goals. If the training isn’t going to help you achieve your goals, it’s probably better to invest valuable resources elsewhere.
2. Effective development clearly articulates job expectations
Development should always present the opportunity to gain more insight on job expectations and what success looks like in the role.
3. Diversify development methods
Instructor-led training is a main source of delivering large amounts of information of key skills and concepts; however, employees often need on-going coaching for reinforcing those concepts and fine-tuning the results. A key would be to keep development FUN and ENGAGING.
- Present a new challenge in the form of a work-related task or project (as stated in my previous #MotivationalMonday post,3 Key Concepts for Motivating Your Employees)
- Provide access to the knowledge and resources necessary to meet the challenge
- Meet regularly during the progress of the project to provide meaningful feedback and mentoring
4. New hires should complete a thorough orientation
Successfully on-boarding new employees is a key development initiative that can increase engagement, productivity, and job satisfaction. Effectively socializing employees helps to decrease the amount of time it takes for employees to be fully operational in their position. New hire orientation (a separate within the on-boarding process) also exposes them to the organizational culture and sets a tone of continuous learning and improvement.
5. Job-related information and training should be readily available
Identify the information and tools employees need to perform their jobs well (including the contact information of the departments/co-workers needed to complete daily job tasks). An important concept to consider would be knowledge management; developing a process to harness organizational information especially from employee that are leaving the company. Having this information, resources, etc. to provide are key to developing new employees and assisting in the improving of organizational efficiency.
Implementing the following 5 best practices will be a great step towards creating a culture of learning.
Resource & Credit: Salsa
Hire for passion and intensity; there is training for everything else.
– Nolan Bushnell, technology pioneer
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