The Business and Employee Skill Gap:

Firstly, let me ask you a question and try to answer it honestly, and I mean really honest.

Is your company or business currently performing at its best?

And if not why, what can you do to be operating at peak performance?

With people being identified as the biggest asset and the biggest liability to business performance, what are you doing to ensure you are ahead of the game?

Over 70% of UK CEO’s and business leaders believed they provided a great to superior employee experience, yet only 31% of their employees agree with this statement, so we have a huge gap between what businesses think they are doing and what is really happening within the business.

It cannot be overstated the importance of employee engagement has on your business productivity and performance.

The current employee engagement gap is resulting in low employee morale, poor collaboration, low innovation and poor employee attrition. Simply put, not delivering a good employee experience is just bad for business.

With over 58% of all UK employees currently seeking employment out with their current employer, we have massive issues to resolve.

So how do we close this gap before it’s too late for you or your business?

Firstly, closing this skill gap cannot happen overnight, there are a few things that need to be done first.

Here is a couple of ways to start closing the gap.

Understanding your employees (The Gap):

Most employees within your business will not come to you and let you know there are problems or even worse than that, they can see ways of doing things better, making improvements to the business but are frightened to stand up.

WHY? Lack of confidence, self-belief, or company culture to stand up and be counted, given the belief or opportunity to be their best.

Running an employee engagement and business performance study is a great way to really understand your employee engagement or business challenges. It lets you identify the real gaps, focus on specifics and create a solution to overcome these challenges one at a time.

Put your employees first:

Making your employees part of the business experiences, part of the core values and beliefs of your business. Communicate these values and beliefs to managers, teams’ members and all employees is the key to increasing productivity. Giving managers, and all employees the tools to communicate freely in a personalising manner will go a long way to help cultivate a people-first open success culture.

So how do we do this? We need to close the learning and development gap.

Let me ask you a couple of questions:

Q1: How important are soft skills within your business?

• Clear communication skills?
• Understanding of other’s traits or characteristics (The generation gap)
• Ability to think freely and have critical thinking abilities?
• A clear understanding of exactly what is expected of each employee?
• Confidence in your abilities?
• Development of behavioural skill sets
• Self-Leadership Development for all employees
• Teamworking Skills

Q2: Out of the above list how much time, effort or thought goes into this type of training and development for your employees?

Human nature dictates that most people will not attempt to do something they don’t believe they are capable of. If they fail at the first few attempts they convince themselves they are not good enough, employees need to be empowered to keep trying.

Most businesses don’t train the employee to allow for this critical thinking, there must be another way, take time to evaluate and try again.

Learning and career development are rated as one of the highest aspects of employee performance and productivity in the business worlds today.

More than 89% of CEO’s or business leaders rate learning & development as the number 1 reason for business growth and employee performance, yet employees on the same survey state that employers focus on L&D is less than 36%, with most saying the current training is less than adequate or not fit for purpose.

Training and career development are the number one reasons that employees choose to stay with a company and many bases their decisions on which company offers the best learning and development. Managers also think training is important with 72% stating that training and development are essential business growth & development.

Unfortunately, 68% of those same managers believe that they are not doing enough to meeting learners needs.

That’s another massive gap between where CEO’s, and business managers think learning should be, compared to where it actually is.

So why does this keep happening? Time, perceived cost of investment, age gap thinking, current training is just not good enough or fit for purpose.

We keep doing the same things we have always done and expected a different result?

With current UK productivity and performance statistics at an all-time low, couple this with the dramatic increase and importance of employee mental health and well-being there is no better time than the present to take charge of your business and employee skills gaps and lead the way.

The Power Within does things differently, we DO NOT have an off the self-approach to leadership or employee development, everything we do is tailored around your actual skill gap analysis.

We laser focus on what matters most to you and your business, we listen to you, help design a tailored approached and implement a step by step framework that will increase employee performance and productivity, whilst creating a success mindset culture throughout the whole business or organisation.

Interested in finding out more and ensuring the future of your business or organisation?

Drop me a PM or Email and let's have a chat.