Progressing your employee's - What it means to them and what it means to your business

Employees valuing career progression opportunities over higher salaries is a growing trend within today’s market. The consequence of that paradigm shift is creating more pressure on leaders to create new opportunities for their existing employees. Pew Research has found that 63% of employees who resigned from their jobs sited “no opportunities for advancement” as one of the leading factors. MIT Sloan surveyed workers from 25 different organisations and found 67% want to advance their careers, but 49% stated a lack of career advice has hurt their job trajectories. So, what can leaders do to create these opportunities for their employees? What are the benefits for the company if the employees are being progressed? How can you keep your employees happy? Here are our recommendations for employee career progression and what leaders can do for their workers.

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Talk about development! The sooner the better

According to the Harvard Business Review, replacing an existing employee can cost your company, on average, 21% of that employee’s annual salary. Losing a top performing employee is not only costly from a monetary perspective, but it also hurts the organisations culture. It’s more important than ever to be giving your workers a reason to stay and career progression opportunities are a fantastic way to achieve that. Research has shown that by an employee’s two-year work anniversary, 30-40% are already searching for the next step in their careers. As a leader, you want those next steps to be within your organisation. It’s never too early to start talking about career development and as the research shows, by that two-year mark it’s already too late!

A scheduled monthly check-in is a great start for discussing career progression with your employee’s. These meetings should be one-on-one and there shouldn’t be any issues scheduling a 15-minute block of time. You will get the opportunity to talk to your employee about their future within the company and it shows them that you value the work they’re doing. These conversations will help you gain valuable insights from your workers, as well as giving you ideas what progression opportunities will be best for them. What are your employee’s goals? How achievable are those goals within your organisation? What support can be given to them to achieve those goals? All these questions will be answered in those monthly meetings and not only will it benefit the employee’s performance but also keeps them thinking about their career within the company. These conversations don’t have to wait, you can start them ASAP!

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Upskilling – More value than a pay rise

The University of Pennsylvania has published multiple articles discussing the benefits of upskilling employees. From increasing employee retention, filling in needed skill gaps within your organisation and even creating a culture of learning, it creates value not only for the employee’s future, but also for your company. As shown previously, any concerns about costs are minimal as it’s cheaper to upskill a current employee than to recruit a replacement, so if you’ve noticed a skill gap within your staff then upskilling is the best way to address that.

Some of the options for upskilling your employees are:

• Scheduling monthly or quarterly opportunities – Such as training days, attending conferences or coursework sign-ups.
• One-on-one meetings – Creates a space to have valuable conversations with your workers and find out what areas they want to develop. This will not only gives you insight, but allows you to plan out success pathways for your workers.
• Volunteering – A great way to develop skills is to allow your staff to volunteer with chosen organisations, nothing promotes learning like hands-on experience!
• Mentoring – Offer the employee a mentorship program with someone they can learn from within the company.
• Short-term training – An option for the whole team, bring in training professionals to your office and hold training seminars. As a leader in the business, you’ll be able to identify a current skill gap within your staff and can correct this through training seminars.?

Upskilled employees not only increase the expertise within your business, but these opportunities are highly desired and sort after by workers. Employee’s who know they will be developed and given these types of career opportunities are going to stay within your organisation. We see this as an absolute win-win, better employees create better businesses.

More responsibilities – Small steps, big changes!

Motivated employees desire challenges, they want to know their work is creating a positive impact on the businesses they represent so let be challenged! Giving high performing employees some additional responsibilities is a tangible way of showing the employee their career growth. The best part is that as a leader, you get to decide what those responsibilities are. Small steps forward create some big changes for your staff, so the additional responsibilities don’t have to be large, but they must be meaningful. Consider bringing that employee to certain meetings or strategy sessions, give them opportunities to provide their own input into the discussion and create an environment for them to learn from senior staff. If you want your employees to be experts, then they need to be actively learning from the existing experts. There are other options such as task swapping with leaders or even giving them responsibilities around conferences or client meetings. The bottom line is these new responsibilities not only create challenges, but make the employee feel valued and appreciated. Not only do you get to give more knowledge to that employee, but you also get to increase their loyalty to the company as well.

At Hinchen, we are fortunate to speak about career progression opportunities daily with our valued customers, contact our experts for market trends and updates: www.hinchen.com.au.

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