Strategic organizations make capital investment decisions based on overall return on investment or ROI of their businesses. Employee development may or may not be at the core of these decisions; however, if not managed appropriately this can have several repercussions on the level of employee satisfaction, which in turn will affect the overall businesses success or failure. The implications can vary from high employee turnover (loss of specialized manpower) to customer dissatisfaction. This can result in the organization’s profitability falling i.e. affecting the ROI and it can also affect long-term sustainability.
With the departure of baby boomers and the appearance of the millennial generation, work requirements are changing and organizations must be able to provide effective learning and development programs to meet the diversity of its employee needs. To meet the needs of today’s diverse employees’, organizations must cultivate and maintain a working environment that encourages learning, provides challenges, and allows growth opportunities that keep employees engaged. This helps in leveraging the organization’s strategic goals in ROI acquisition, and at the same time keeping their employees happy.
Loyalty vs. Loyalty
A customer’s loyalty is often relying on employee loyalty, since anyone would like to deal with people who are stable. It should always be a key priority of any business to assess and improve employee satisfaction levels. Satisfied employees are less likely to entertain other job options and can be a source of bringing in new potential human resources as they spread the word of mouth on how great the organization they work for is!
Five Steps for Employees’ Retention, Development, Job Performance and Job Improvement:
Step One: understand the needs of your employee and know whether they are happy and committed in working for your organization. To achieve this, an organizational level employee satisfaction survey can be conducted. Surveys tell you how your employees currently feel about working at your organization. It helps understand why the employees do what they do and also gives the management a clear direction on where improvement is required.
Step Two: understand what motivates and what drives the employees to perform better so that your organization can take meaningful steps to both maintaining the strengths and addressing the weaknesses. This will be essential in improving productivity and reducing employee turnover.
Step Three: link recruiting directly to learning. Organizations must provide an effective onboarding process to move new hires into a productive status and increase retention rates. Talent acquisition teams within HRM become a strategic force within any organization. Employees are confident they’re receiving the right training and skills development.
Step Four: HRM is directly responsible for the employees training and development needs, hence they should enable the right resources and effective system to operate within the strategic aims. By combining organizational strategy and succession planning within the recruitment processes, management can support their long term ROI.
Step Five: consider your employees’ as an ‘Asset’ rather than a ‘Cost’. Organizations should import best practices that had been previously identified in organizational development. A term now often used to describe performance assessment is ‘benchmarking’ which seeks to assess the competencies of an organization against the best in classes. This kind of practice can be assessed by monitoring the employee performance on a long term basis. With an integrated approach, ongoing performance management is the best way to drive training and development programs, as well as link performance results to variable compensation factors. Proactive use of performance information for learning and rewards typically implies a higher level of frequency for evaluations.
