Empowering employees with learning and development programs

It is extremely important for organisations to foster a culture of empowerment for employees. As an article in Harvard Business Review states, “Empowered employees are more likely to be powerful, confident individuals, who are committed to meaningful goals and demonstrate initiative and creativity to achieve them. They typically have the freedom to generate novel ideas and the confidence that these ideas will be valued.” These above-mentioned traits are highly sought out by most organisations in their employees.

Employees can be empowered through a variety of methods, including sharing honest, positive feedback on a regular basis, cultivating a culture of trust and empathy, delegating responsibilities without micromanagement, and, last but not least, fostering learning and growth opportunities. It is required for leaders to empower employees so that their hidden potential can be unlocked, resulting in better job performance, job satisfaction, and commitment of the employees to the organisation.

 

Learning and development programs for empowering employees

One of the most significant ways to empower employees is through continuous and consistent efforts to improve and aiding the growth of their learning curves. This can be achieved using well-thought-out and relevant learning and development programs that target not only improving the skillsets of the employees but also bringing out their latent qualities and unleashing their true potential.

Learning and development is a continuous process and starts right from the time of hiring a new employee and onboarding them. This process encompasses various training and development phases, including leadership training, promoted managers training, and executive coaching.

Ideally, an employee should continuously keep on upgrading themselves with respect to their skillset and technical knowledge. However, it is also important to groom an employee and provide them with soft skill development opportunities if required, so that this does not become a deterrent in the path of their growth. Moreover, to ensure strict adherence to norms and suppress any digression towards incorrectness of behaviour, it is imperative to provide training on cultural sensitization to every employee on a regular basis. It is also required to train the trainer, so that more people can benefit when their learning trickles down to other employees they would train.

About learning and development programs

The ideal learning and development programs are not designed to spoon-feed employees with information. These are designed with clear guidelines on training need identification and training need analysis, which results in identifying the potential or weakness in the employees and grooming them in relevant and significant ways.

Learning and development programs are designed to guide and help employees to self-reflect, introspect, realise and work on their inhibitions, challenges, and weaknesses. This, in turn, helps them to learn and grow at an individual level as well as drive the organisation towards a better trajectory.

These programs should encompass the following solutions:

• Training Need Identification (TNI) and education map: Visualise the training requirements across the organisation, divide these training programs into various categories and create a level-wise classification.
• Learning and development framework: Setting up a system to effectively manage internal training activities in an organisation.

Why learning and development programs?

Learning and development programs are not meant only for improving the quality of employees. These also have a hugely beneficial effect on the business and productivity of an organisation. Some of these benefits include:

• Empowerment of employees: This leads them to deliver more quality work in less time and with less continuous guidance, which translates to better job performance
• Job satisfaction: Most high-performing employees nowadays are focussed on improving their learning curve and are happier in organisations that foster an environment of continuous learning on the job
• Commitment to the organisation: Higher job satisfaction also results in higher loyalty towards the organisation, and hence, less attrition of high-performers
• Addressing weaknesses in employees: Consistent learning opportunities help in bridging the gaps when an employee becomes a weak link in their organisation
• Improved brand value of organisation: It is easier to attract the talent pool for organisations that foster learning opportunities.

To reap the above-mentioned benefits, organisations should provide training at various stages of the employee lifecycle, including:

• Leadership training: to identify high-potential individuals at an early stage and develop them to become leaders
• Promoted managers training: to smoothen the transition of employees who have recently moved to managerial roles and help them inculcate values and skills required in their positions
• Executive coaching: to equip leadership level employees with the requisite knowledge, skillset, and psychology to develop themselves and become more effective in their roles

Given the benefits of empowering employees with learning and development programs, it is important for organisations to invest in good tools and frameworks to foster the learning environment. However, the biggest challenge is that there is no one size fits all approach to learning. It can take huge effort and finances to shift the culture towards continuous learning, and also, finding the right resources to create the frameworks and the contents of the training courses is difficult.

Pasona provides organisations with all the benefits of extremely well-designed learning and development programs, without any of the headaches associated with them. Pasona India not only provides organisations with world-class learning and development programs but also other HR solutions, including HR Consulting, HR Outsourcing, Recruitment Solutions, Executive Search, and Staffing Solutions. To Know more, contact us for more information.