Part of being a good employer is fulfilling the duty of care you have to your employees. This isn’t just about making sure they are paid accurately and in a timely fashion, or ensuring they have adequate access to refreshments and bathrooms, but also about making sure their career goals can be achieved.
It can be hard to accomplish this while also fulfilling the demands of your own job role, so it is important to have processes in place to easily and consistently offer your employees the opportunity for professional growth. Here we are going to look at five of the steps any employer or manager should take to ensure they are helping their employees progress their careers.
Get to Know Your Employees Ambitions
A big part of helping your employees meeting their professional ambitions will be getting to know what they are. You may well have competent and qualified workers that are waiting to make the step up to the next level but have never had the time invested in them to realize their potential.
Set aside some time every week to spend getting to know your employees and finding out more about them. This will help you to plan the progression of each employee and correctly analyze them as a resource for your company. You may have some gems hidden on the shop floor, waiting to shine in middle management.
Run a Mentorship Program
Helping employees progress can be a demanding task and will consume a lot of your time and resources. By starting a mentorship program at your management level, you can include more members of your management team and spread the demand among the whole management structure.
This also provides your management team with an opportunity to develop a new skill and talent in mentoring and developing employees and create more opportunity for communication amongst the different levels of your company’s hierarchy.
Help Them Get Qualified
Many employees will have the skills and experience they need to progress in your company, but not the qualifications. All too often people will have either experience or qualifications, but not both. Higher education qualifications can often draw a lot of attention when you are assessing employees, but it is important not to overlook the value of industry experience.
Often it just takes a small, role-specific qualification to give an experienced employee the certification they need to step up. For a company like a law firm, enrolling employees in LSAT classes can be incredibly cost-effective and help experienced clerks make the step up to the next level in a law firm.
Engage in Team Building Exercises
A great way to help employees grow and develop themselves. Group tasks will often help you to identify natural leaders and see your employees utilize their skills up close while working with their colleagues to achieve a group goal.
These tasks can be business specific, and be a part of a project within your company, or you can use novelty team-building exercises to bring your employees together and show their skills. There are even companies that you can outsource these activities to, and they will give you customized and structured performance reports on employees or departments within your company.
Assign Projects to Employees That Want a Challenge
Giving an employee a project to work on for you is an effective way to give your employee the opportunity to challenge themselves and get a taste of business at a higher level. If you have a particular department in mind for an employee, or a specific job role for them to fulfill when they step up into management, providing them with a project in this area is a great way to see how they would perform if they had that kind of task full-time.
This can also give an eager employee the opportunity to prove to you, and themselves, that they have the skills and competencies required to successfully operate at the higher levels of your company.
The demands of managing your human resources can be very time-consuming without plans in place to help you quickly help your employees find and follow their career path. With the right guidance and mentorship, you will find your employees can excel in just about any avenue and give your company a huge return on the investment they make in them.
Hopefully, this guide has given you the information you need to begin developing your staff and getting the most out of your employees while offering them a route to their own professional success that can benefit you and your business later.
