As a business leader, you’ll be well aware that the success of your enterprise largely depends on the skills and motivation of the people who work for you. So it’s crucial to keep your employees’ knowledge and skills sufficiently updated. And also to motivate them over the longer term, by helping them develop and grow their capabilities and careers. If learning and development is disregarded, skills get stale, knowledge becomes out of date, motivation levels stagnate and careers begin to drift – and these factors have an obvious impact on hard measures like productivity and staff turnover. Too often though, training comes last on the To Do list – with a common reason being “we just don’t have the budget for it”.
But the good news is, effective training and development needn’t cost the earth. If you’re prepared to think creatively and invest a little time, you can easily organise all sorts of focused and robust learning activities without breaking the bank. Here are some ideas to kick you off:
Ask Your Staff What They Think They Need
To help you identify what your staff need to learn in order to perform even better in their current roles (or perhaps for future roles you may have in mind for them) talk to them. Ask them what they think their training needs are, and what new skills or knowledge they would like to learn. This may not give you the whole picture of course, as some employees have better self awareness than others, while others might need to have their expectations managed. But it’s still a good idea to involve them in conversations about their needs so they can take some ownership of their development.
Explore E-Learning
Training courses are no longer just about hotel conference suites and flip charts. These days there’s a whole new world of virtual training on offer, with courses available on almost any topic imaginable. Online training means staff can learn at their own convenience and pace, with costs generally low and many even free. Check out websites like www.learndirect.com, www.e-learningcentre.co.uk, www.learningtree.co.uk, www.dalecarnegie.co.uk, www.reed.co.uk to find out more.
Join And Use Your Relevant Industry Body Or Trade Association
These often provide easy access to relevant and cost effective training, seminars, workshops and networking events, so take full advantage of what’s available in your industry or trade body.
Capitalise On The Abilities You Already Have In-House
There are loads of ways you can do this, depending on the circumstances. For example:
- Ask team members with specific areas of expertise to deliver short training programmes or presentations for other staff, focussing on their specialist areas. In addition to building competence in the trainees, this approach will build presentation and training skills in your experts, gets them involved in knowledge sharing and helps create a culture of learning.
- Promote inter-departmental sessions, for example by organising ‘brown bag’ lunches, with each hosted and run by a different department in turn. It’s not unusual for staff members to know very little about what different departments do, the contexts in which they operate and the challenges they face. Brown bag lunches are a really effective way to help departments educate each other about their activities and at the same time encourage network-building and a ‘one team’ culture across your business.
Encourage Work Shadowing /Job Shadowing
This is used a lot in organisations to boost on-the-job learning by giving people the chance to observe and/or work alongside current job holders. Some of the ways work shadowing will help your people include:
- Induction training – for new starters, or existing employees moving to a different role in the company, job shadowing for a few days is a great way to give them an understanding of the key aspects of the job, and what ‘good’ performance looks like. As a result they’re more likely to feel confident and prepared in advance, and it’s likely to reduce the time needed for them to become effective in-role once they’ve started.
- Skill development – work shadowing is fundamentally about transferring knowledge and expertise from one staff member to another. And you can use it to help build specific skills for people to apply back in their own day jobs. I have seen work shadowing used brilliantly as a way to help people learn specific areas of technical knowledge from colleagues who are experts in the field. Done well, the technical expert can follow up the shadowing stage by setting relevant tasks or mini- project work to help the trainee consolidate and use what they’ve learned, and finish off with a feedback and review stage. I have also seen work shadowing used to build professional skills – a recent example being a manager skilled in facilitating large multi-discipline meetings shadowed by another manager who needed to learn this skill fast.
Mentor For Success
Another effective way to leverage the expertise you already have in-house is to ask experienced staff members to mentor more junior colleagues. Research shows mentoring to be a powerful way of passing on knowledge and experience, and it can help build a range of skills in mentees such as decision making, commercial awareness, market understanding and people management. Meanwhile your mentors get to hone their skills in development coaching and feedback. The best mentoring programmes I have known go on to develop the mentees themselves as mentors for less experienced colleagues, further down the line.
Make Smart Use Of External Conferences And Training
Sometimes it’s going to be necessary to fund employees’ attendance at external events. So to maximise your investment in doing this, make it a condition that staff report back on their return to the workplace, ask them to:
- present and discuss key learning points with colleagues
- explain how they will use what they have just learned in their roles, and agree some goals around this
So in summary – good quality, relevant learning and development really doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive. If you’re prepared to invest a little planning and time, this is likely to pay big dividends in terms of improved employee skills, knowledge and motivation.
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Photo Credit: Shoestring Budget by AV Dezign | www.avdezign.ca
