When done correctly, a good staff development plan is a win-win for the business and its employees. Staff come away with new skills that they can apply in the future, and businesses get better productivity and performance from those staff members. If you want to grow your business by developing and training your talent, here's a 5 step staff development plan to follow.
1. Set Your Business Goals
The first step to increasing business growth with a great staff development plan is to determine exactly how you want your business to get better. While your end goal is most likely to increase your profit, you need to decide how you'll go about that first. Possible goals include everything from speeding up production time to expanding your product or service line. For the purpose of this guide, imagine your business goal is to increase your customer base by double.
2. Identify Your Employees' Shortcomings
Once you know what you want to achieve, your next step is to determine why your staff can't currently achieve it. This is called a training needs analysis and involves assessing your employees' performance, knowledge and skills. What key understandings or abilities do your staff need to be able to meet your business goals? The answer to that question will be the main focus of your development plan. In the case of the aforementioned example, staff may need a better knowledge of customer acquisition methods.
3. Strategize Training Objectives
Next, it's time to plan exactly how you'll enable your staff to meet your goals. Coming up with strategic training objectives will ensure that staff development is as quick, efficient and effective as possible. This will help you get to your goal faster while minimising wasted resources (including time and money). Following the original example, training goals for increasing the customer base may include learning how to use market analysis and profiling techniques or learning how to use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
4. Acquire and Deliver the Training
Finally, it's time to train your staff according to your development plan. Generally, you'll have three options: have expert staff train junior staff, outsource the training or create a custom training program. The first option is the least efficient; it's difficult to oversee and ensure that all training objectives are met, and it takes valuable time out of your expert employees' days. Outsourcing is the middle ground of affordability and efficiency, especially if you opt to buy online training packages. A custom staff development program is the best way to gear staff up to meet your specific business goals. In the case of the example business, the manager may decide to enrol staff on a week-long online general customer acquisition course.
5. Measure the Results
Last, but not least, you need to determine whether the staff development process worked. To do this, you should look at a variety of factors. Take note of training completion rates, ask employees for feedback on the course, and compare their new performance to their old performance. If your training was a success, you can move on to a new goal and repeat the process again. If it was lacking, you can go back to step 2 or 3 to re-strategize your development plan.
Share