Running a high-performance company in today’s competitive and ever-changing business environment requires that you have team members willing to learn advanced skills to handle new and rising challenges. Specifically, you want to have you and your people developing in tandem. To this end, you need to facilitate and invest in your human capital’s growth as part of the business’s core strategy.

Learning and development (L&D) strategies are meant to help develop your workforce’s capabilities, skills, and competencies. When done right, these strategies could be the foundation of a successful business. Here’s how L&D can contribute to maintenance of a high-performance company today.

Talent Management

At present, more than one in three American workers are Millenials. 59% of these Millennial candidates express the desire to learn and grow even as they pursue their career paths; ditto for Gen Z candidates who, according to the Workplace Learning Report 2021, expressed their interest in learning as they believed it to be the key to a successful career path. Concisely, learning is essential to both these cohorts that make up the majority of the recruitment pool. It would only then be appropriate to invest in training and learning programs if you are to attract and retain talent.

Understandably, the onboarding experience is key to attracting employees and retaining them. Research shows that when you have a strong onboarding process, your business stands the chances of improving new hire retention by 82% and employee productivity by over 70%. When you take the time to train new employees at the onboarding stage, it shows that the organization already values them which improves the chances of retention.

Besides, when you show your commitment to the development of your employees, it generates a sense of loyalty with your business that makes them want to stay. In retrospect, this is why investing in employee development is considered an investment in the company’s growth and sustainability. Overall, when you have L&D, you stand a better chance of attracting and retaining top talent.

Engagement and Motivation of Employees

Keeping your employees engaged is serious business! Unfortunately, finding a single approach to successful employee engagement is rather impossible. Still, research shows that almost 42% of L&D professionals reported that employees that were highly engaged in learning also showed high engagement throughout the organization.

A strategy you can employ using L&D to further engage and motivate your employees is generating company-wide influence. This simply means uniting and engaging your entire workforce by making the training and learning a shared endeavor. Here, you will be leveraging the power of across-the-board engagement that leads to higher employee engagement overall.

Building of an “Employer Brand”

As highlighted, having the right talent is critical to the success of your business. You want to have a team that delivers the right innovation, skills, and insights if you are to stay ahead of the competition. Achieving this becomes a bit difficult when you cannot attract the right candidates. Fortunately, having L&D strategies in place could help make your business the “employer of choice.” The ripple effect would be that top talent would naturally gravitate towards your business.

To further use L&D to build your brand as an employer, consider making the strategy personal, seeing as a generic L&D is bound to fail. This is informed by the characteristic of the majority with the current employee pool who have been conditioned by a lifetime of personalization. You want to translate the same to your L&D. Practical examples would be to, for instance, provide individual applicants or employees individual logins and dashboard. In hindsight, this sells your brand as being an employer that’s big on self-led capabilities.

Creation and Maintenance of a Company Culture

Post-COVID, we are seeing greater adoption of remote and hybrid workplaces. This new work model presents unique challenges, especially as it pertains to developing and maintaining company culture. Fortunately, L&D can help with building a sense of community and a value-based culture even with the dispersed workforce. Developing these two facets of your organization is important, seeing as Millennials, who make up the highest percentage of your employee pool, express great interest in working for values-based, sustainable enterprises.

As an organization, it would be best if you adopted a culture of being a “learning organization.” This means that no longer is training considered a luxury item that employees rarely value and are resistant to. This elevates L&D as a strategic and necessary investment that should see the business continue to grow and increase its market position.

Development of Your People and their Capabilities

With the growth of innovation and knowledge base, knowledge becoming outdated or forgotten is a more rapid occurrence. The consequence is that the value of your human resources decreases which informs the need for these to be supplemented by new learning and relevant work experiences.

Therefore, regardless of the industry, there’s demand for a rapid change of pace which means that for employers and employees to stay ahead of the curve, there’s got to be focus on L&D. Note that when you invest in developing your employee’s skills and capabilities, you are likely going to have this investment paid off as higher productivity and ability to handle new challenges as they pop up.

To survive in today’s business environment, you require a sustainable competitive advantage. A key consideration in the pursuit of this competitive edge is the organization’s workforce. Training and development of this workforce has proven to be integral to business success.

Going into said training, you require an intelligent and modern solution that is highly adaptive to the changes within your organization. This solution is meant to ensure that you achieve the aforementioned while ensuring that the audience still feels your commitment to their development. The tool should be able to take care of the administration, automation, and delivery of the learning material, training programs, and real-time instructional sessions.

Execute your organization’s online learning programs with isolved Learn & Grow, an end-to-end learning management software that drives continuous learning and training, all while keeping your employees engaged and your business compliant. 

ABOUT PLATINUM GROUP

Platinum Group is a human capital management resource with solutions to help you streamline operations so you’ll have time to manage your business. No matter which division you work with: Payroll/HR or Accounting, our team is built upon a foundation of support, service, camaraderie and collaboration that we share both in-house and with our wonderful clients. For more information about Platinum Group, or to schedule a demo of isolved, please visit our website.