It's easy to say your employees are the
As senior vice president of human resources for a fully remote e-commerce company, I have learned that retaining talent isn't always about a promotion or a raise. However, taking the time to understand the goals of your employees and then helping them achieve those goals through a personalized professional development program is essential to both hiring and retention. The good news is you can develop a robust training and professional development program that supports hiring and retention without employing a dedicated, full-time training person. Here are six ways that HR teams can enhance training and development for remote or in-person teams.
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1. Use a "how to" approach and focus on core pillars
Focusing your efforts into core pillars can create efficiencies and help you do more with fewer resources. For example, our organization focuses on the pillars of building functional expertise and nurturing personal growth. To support the pillar of building functional expertise, we encourage employees to pursue external training and certifications. As a result, our entire sales enablement and customer experience teams recently earned their Flexible Compensation Specialist (FCS) certifications through the Employer's Council on Flexible Compensation (ECFC).
Meanwhile, other employees have pursued industry certifications in retail and e-commerce, flexible compensation compliance, and finance. To further support functional expertise among our workforce, we provide all new hires with a department overview of all areas of the company, so they have a full understanding of how our business operates, and we offer monthly lunch and learns that are hosted by different departments to keep all employees apprised of business activity and how their jobs support or impact each other.
2. Understand what employees want and need
To nurture personal growth among employees, our organization delivers tools that help individuals define and chart their own course. This is important, because it's not always dependent on the manager to define and drive growth for their team. For example, we ask each employee to complete a professional development toolkit that helps them think about and map out their career goals, and the path they hope their career will take. This employee-driven tool is then used when talking to their manager about their performance over time. In addition to custom, in-house tools like our professional development toolkit, HR teams should also consider external resources like one-on-one career coaching services. We offer all employees a six-month coaching membership to help them address and advance their personal growth goals.
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3. Demonstrate leadership support and involvement
As with any other initiative, policy or program, your outcomes will improve if employees see that leadership — from the CEO to their day-to-day manager — also buys into the program. However, it's important to remember that just because someone is good at their job and holds a leadership title, that doesn't mean they are a natural born leader. Leadership is a functional skill that needs to be nurtured, which is why we provide leadership coaching and 360-degree support for anyone in a managerial position, and we host monthly manager bootcamps to continually evolve those skills.
The more aware and educated your management team is, the more effective they will be at supporting your training and employee education initiatives. This is especially important for company-wide initiatives like DEI and belonging training, which require education and employee buy-in to be successful. To make such cultural training sessions more meaningful, we use tools like Factuality to deliver objective education, while teaching management and employees about our policies and how they are to be implemented.
4. Make it fun
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5. Be respectful of time requirements
It's always a challenge to fit professional development into the daily schedule for employees, without interrupting the flow of their work. That's why it's important to schedule training activities so they fit with your employees' schedules and the way in which your team works. For example, our organization has found that in a remote environment, a full-day virtual training can be exhausting. As a result, we offer training events in shorter time frames, integrate breakouts for longer topics, and spread training out over a few days, when needed. This eliminates the stress and fear that employees have of falling behind in their work due to training events.
6. Use creativity to stretch your training budget
Establishing an effective professional development program doesn't have to break your budget. While there are many valuable plug-and-play training solutions that you can pay for, don't overlook the talent and expertise that you have within your own team. Case in point, our department leaders love taking the opportunity to educate the organization about what they do and enthusiastically host lunch and learn sessions. We also call on our internal compliance experts to provide product training for our customer experience and sales teams.
The new year is the perfect opportunity to evaluate and improve your professional development program, while engaging your workforce in the process of setting goals and establishing a vision for the year and their future career. And with a little creativity, a dash of fun, and a focus on your company's business strategy and workflows, you can elevate your training efforts to better support the business and improve hiring and retention.
