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Employees are a company’s most valuable resource and strategies for their career development are crucial in showing them that they matter. Of the ‘essentials’ that need to be addressed to ensure an organisation’s employee engagement efforts are effective, definite career path programmes will lead to workforce longevity and retention.
It’s a lot like a company looking after its existing customers and retaining them through effective customer loyalty strategies; why lose one through neglect and face having to prospect for new ones, which is both time consuming and costly? It’s easier and more cost effective to look after them properly and keep them loyal in the first place. The same is true of employee engagement.
Good employee engagement will ensure your team members are motivated and committed to doing their part to achieve corporate and not just their own goals. The latter point will be largely because employees know that the company already has their best career interests covered.
Career path clarity – just one of the essentials
And one way of reassuring employees that their employer has their best interests covered will be by showing them a clear career path exists, one with all the possibilities for their progression. Also, that training and coaching plans are all in place as part of normal corporate staff development. Without such, studies have shown this to be one of the main reasons individuals will consider leaving a company and, conversely, why they would choose to join an organisation in the first place.
In one survey carried out by Randstad and Ipsos, the importance and effectiveness of career development programmes were highlighted when 28% of employees surveyed said that one of the most effective engagement tools was for a company to invest in each employees’ careers through training, professional development or continuing education.
Feeling more in control of their individual career paths and being encouraged to follow their intrinsic motivations will all be helped by effective internal communications and inter-personal communications between employees and management. Because no matter how good a company’s career path element of its employee engagement strategy is, it will still need middle management and business processes to communicate and, to a degree, control these. A career path for an employee is not something that can just be handed to them and they know that; they need guidance.
That said, one-to-one meetings or coaching conversations, are essential in order for management to discover the skills an employee hopes to gain. It’s all part of good employee engagement. Developing a healthy relationship with employees is the best way to ensure that dialogue between managers and employees is constructive and leads each to find the common ground between a) the skills a team needs, b) the skills the organisation requires, and c) the skills and interests of the individual employee.
A growing number of successful organisations are utilizing the power of mobile apps in their employee engagement processes. Apps that aid personal development in turn leading to greater and sustained motivation and the achievement of both corporate and individual aims are in demand and becoming more widespread.
