Retaining Your Team with Career Development

Retaining Your Team with Career Development

Employee retention is a hot-button issue for organizations in most, if not all, industries. A recent study by Steelcase has shown that only 14% of US employees are “highly engaged” and “highly satisfied.” As these types of engagement and satisfaction surveys continue to show a decline in happy employees, many business leaders are struggling to discover how they can improve employee moral, engagement, and loyalty.

One way to combat this issue is through career development initiatives. Many employees are disengaged and ready to “jump ship” because they do not feel as if they are growing in their position, or may not have the right tools and ability in place to move up within their organization. Understanding where your employees see themselves in the coming years, and giving them guidance to achieve their goals, will increase your retention rates greatly.

The HR Blog has identified a variety of components that can help make a difference when it comes to having these career conversations:

Employee Assessments
Employee assessments come in a variety of different forms. These include 360-degree reviews, performance appraisals, self-assessments, skill assessments, personality tests, IQ tests, and EQ tests. These tools can be used to benchmark employee performance and development in order to identify areas of strength and weakness.

Building a Development Plan
Based on the information discovered with the employee assessments, employees and managers can have a conversation about the skills they may be currently missing and how they can gain them in order to take the next step. From there, long-term goals can be developed and utilized to move an employee along their desired career path.

Providing The Necessary Tools
After building the growth plan, your employees will need the right tools to close the gaps in their knowledge and skills. Analyzing the weaknesses and discovering what ways the employee can improve those skills are crucial to helping them move along their career path. These solutions can be a mix of experiential learning and formal training such as: training, mentoring, rotation programs, seminars, conferences, shadowing, and more.

Create Actionable Steps
Now that you have analyzed the areas of strength and weakness, created a career path, and identified which tools your employee needs to be successful, you now need to create a timeline for the goals created. Once your employee completes each step in the process, their goal performance profile can be updated so they will easily be identified when a position becomes open that they are a viable candidate for.

These steps enable you to engage your employees with their current position, to set them up for their future position. By increasing these engagement and satisfaction ratios within your organization, you will see retention rates rise, and recruitment costs decline.

This DATIS Blog was written by Carley Donovan, DATIS, on September 13th, 2016 and may not be re-posted without permission.

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