When workplace productivity falls, business revenue and growth decline also. Several factors can hamper your employees’ efficiency, such as an ineffective organizational structure or a lack of adequate employee training programs. Typically, managerial inadequacies lead to employees lacking the motivation, skills, tools, and self-drive necessary to achieve good results at work.
The Importance of Ongoing Training for Employees
Investing in your employees’ career development will set up your organization for greater success. According to a LinkedIn report, 94% of staff would stay with their current employer if presented with opportunities that facilitated their professional growth.
You can achieve this by implementing an ongoing employee coaching program with plenty of win-win outcomes, including:
- Onboarding new employees into your company culture– This is an opportunity to help your new hires quickly adopt acceptable behaviors and practices. This way, they can smoothly get started on their roles without compromising your company’s mission and values.
- Motivating your staff– Most employees want to develop professionally and be promoted to higher positions. Many will gladly accept an opportunity to acquire new skills that qualify them for a promotion or better perks. As a coach, you can help each of your employees with their career goals by imparting the necessary competencies and knowledge.
- Closing skill gaps– Tap into your existing workforce to close skill gaps instead of always looking for new hires. Start by identifying operational areas in your organization that require improvement in personnel competencies. Ongoing employee training is a perfect opportunity to build workforce skills and improve productivity in tandem with your overall goals.
Tips to Coach Your Employees
The following are proven approaches to building an effective, self-driven team in your organization:
- Welcome feedback– By encouraging your employees to speak up, you’re telling them that they play a vital role in helping your organization succeed. You should also provide feedback for each employee on excellent, average, or poor performance, motivating them to improve where necessary.
- Encourage fresh ideas– Your employees have a wealth of ideas that you can implement to move your company forward. Hearing what they have to say makes them feel respected, encouraging more positive contributions toward overall growth. You should pay close attention to new concepts from your frontline staff. This team interacts with your customers directly every day, so they’re a reliable source of ideas to improve service delivery.
- Give challenging assignments– For your staff to improve their skillset and develop professionally, they might need a little push beyond their comfort zone. For example, you can let an employee participate in a decision-making process along with the management. Assigning them a role requiring new skills or sharpening existing ones is an excellent way to impart relevant job experience and improve their confidence.
- Recognize excellent performance– Acknowledging employees’ efforts, progress and results help to build their confidence. It motivates staff to work harder for greater performance.
- Accept occasional poor performance– Sometimes, helping an employee improve after making a one-off mistake is better than severely reprimanding them. This doesn’t mean you should ignore failure. When a team member disappoints, let them demonstrate their understanding of the problem at hand, how they’ll fix it and how they’ll prevent a recurrence.
- Set clear goals– Coaching employees for improved productivity includes setting and facilitating their achievement of specific targets. You could cross-train an employee for a different business unit, helping them acquire new skills and experiences. This approach to professional development can also help your company achieve its objectives.
- Show up in an hour of need– Even the most self-driven employee sometimes needs and appreciates help from their superiors. Therefore, it’s important that you’re always available to answer questions or address concerns that team members may raise from time to time. You could create an in-person or virtual forum where employees can ask questions and get answers. This type of support from the management can stimulate workplace productivity.
- Advise, but don’t always intervene– Employees won’t learn and get better at work if you always step in to fix their failures. Instead, a good coach provides guidance while letting staff learn to do things the right way.
- Solicit help/advice– Recognize that your employees may have valuable knowledge that can be harnessed to help your organization grow. If you let them have a say over certain aspects of conducting business, they’ll know that their opinion counts. It’ll create a positive work environment in which your employees want to improve consistently.
- Provide instantaneous coaching– Opportunities to coach an employee may come up in real-time, such as when a staff member approaches you with a question, or you’ve noticed an oversight on the job. Be willing to give instant advice, recommendation or feedback where needed. If you’re too busy, make sure to follow up on the matter in due time. Instantaneous mentorship helps to gradually improve an employees’ competencies for their particular role in your organization.
- Assess performance-Along with your employees, review and grade performance after each project. Discuss positives and negatives with specifics on how to improve in the future. Remember to appreciate your team for their effort.
- Develop mutual trust– Encourage transparency between the coaching team and employees to achieve better training results.
- Facilitate/encourage collaboration– Teamwork enables employees to learn from and build each other. As a result, it can spur productivity as well as an individual’s professional development.
- Prioritize effort over talent– Your employees are more likely to work harder (and produce more) if you acknowledge their efforts instead of just abilities. A relentless effort has been proven to have a multiplier effect on raw talent.
These are some of the proven approaches to workforce training for growth and enhanced operational efficiencies. If you need assistance in training your employees, reach out to Economic Development Collaborative today!
