How to Develop Your Employees During Economy Downturn?
During economy downturn, many organizations are putting in a lot of hard effort to reduce cost in order to survive. They have no choice but to cut down the budget allocated for developing employees. In my personal point of view, this is not right because staff development is an ongoing process and it must be done in a consistent manner. We can’t stop it even if we are facing financial hardship. If there is no action taken to improve the performance of the employees, in the long run, the productivity of a company will be affected badly.
There are many ways we can use to develop our employees. Attending conferences, seminars, public workshops or in-house training are common ways to increase the competencies of different employees. However, all these methods involve certain costs. What if the budget of a company is really tight?
Seriously speaking, employee development is not costly. There are some economical alternatives. I would highly recommend “coaching based training”. If you are a manager, you can coach the employees yourself if you have the required knowledge and skills. If your schedule is tight, you can get the seniors to coach the juniors. If you want to train the employees to be all-rounded, you can arrange for job rotations. Let all the employees learn new skills and become more adaptable to different types of jobs. Learning and training can be flexible and fun. It is not necessary to go through formal learning process. In some situation, informal training can bring better outcomes.
In order to achieve great success in employee development, it is important for the top management to link learning to goals. The employees may dislike training or coaching if they are not clear about the purpose of learning. We need to make sure that employees understand how they can gain benefit from what they have learnt. The results will be good if we can tie staff development to specific goals or career development. It is our responsibility to guide the employees to reach the goals.
Employees are important assets. In order to increase the value of the assets, an organization should invest time to bring the employees up. The development may not involve any cost. Being a smart leader, you should make good use of your current resources. By developing the employees in an effective way, they will be able to contribute more to the company.