Employee Training: Why Companies Should Encourage Employees’ Self-Improvement 

Every company should invest in their own employees’ training. As a company owner or a talent manager, you need to make sure your teammates are excited and motivated to go to work. That is why investing in the personal growth of in-house or offshore programmers and mobile developers is crucial for building a balanced, successful workplace. 

📚 In this post, we will take a look at the top ways to fuel the growth of your team. But first, take a look at these 16 questions employees use to evaluate their employers. 

4 Benefits of Investing in Employee Training 

Building a system for employee training is a decision that requires dedication and commitment both from team leaders and business owners. Since most teams have hectic schedules and dozens of pending tasks, setting time aside to train peers might be a challenge.  

However, the truth is, the benefits of employee training make it worth your time and effort. Let’s take a look at the top employee training advantages:

1. Improved employee retention

Employee turnover and hiring costs are one of the top expenses for SME and large-scale business owners. According to statistics, having to look for new teammates constantly costs businesses about $11 billion per year. 

How does employee learning improve retention? According to statistics, untrained employees are more likely to leave the company within the first year of employment. The professionals who are dissatisfied with their workplace often name the lack of growth and employee development as the main reason for being unhappy at work. 

Thus, it is safe to say that training employees and helping them grow professionally will grow their loyalty towards the company, encouraging them to keep working there. 

📚 Find out what are the best ways to drive employee development in your company. 

2. Employee training increases employee productivity 

Building an efficient team is the primary goal of bringing new hires on board. However, the truth is, expanding your staff is not the only way to get more work done in a day and bring more clients on board. 

Instead of spending a dime on hiring, consider maximizing the value of each employee working at the company by investing in employee training. According to statistics, low employee engagement makes business owners lose about $500 million per year. Low productivity, poor organization habits, and lacking organization skills of your team might be the thing holding the company back from doing its best. 

3. Employee training improves workplace innovation

Educating employees on new technologies and trends allows business owners to be innovative. According to statistics, by encouraging employee training, you will be able to foster the skills needed to create next-generation projects or use out-of-the-box approaches to service handling. 

Here are the areas of employee career development that impact workplace innovation: 

• Creativity skills and brainstorming 
• Workplace stress management 
• Communication flexibility 
• Organization and efficiency 
• New tools and technologies 

4. Employee training ensures consistent performance

One of the goals of constantly training app developers is to ensure that they have enough skill to consistently maintain complex products or meet clients’ expectations. Investing in employee training is a smart long-term strategy for company managers – this way, they ensure the team’s steady adherence to standards and best practices. 

By improving the brand’s reputation and operational efficiency with the help of employee education, business owners maximize their revenue and facilitate scaling. 

13 Tried-and-True Employee Training Tips 

If you want to take your team’s efficiency to the next level, make an impact on the industry, and generate more revenue, employee training should be the cornerstone of your development strategy. 

Depending on your budget, the structure of the organization you manage, and the type of employees you are onboarding, there are different practices of employee training. Here are the top 13 ways business owners use to empower the next-generation workforce. 

• Hosting peer-to-peer workshops, seminars, and education meetings where teammates pass skills to one another and exchange experiences.  
• Getting to know the industry by exploring what competitors are doing, pinpointing best practices, and incorporating them into the workflow.  
• Inviting experts from colleges or professional associations to consult staff on new legislation policies, trends, and practices.  
• Creating playbooks for learning, compiling reading lists, or investing in online courses for the team to pass.  
• Encouraging the team to complete certification programs and confirm their skills (business owners can offer employees monetary compensation for completing a certification program).  
• Peer-to-peer mentoring that helps new hires get used to best practices, as they will be overseen and advised by seniors.  
• Creating a learning platform where all team members can access learning materials and case studies.  
• Integrating learning time into daily routines. Business owners should allow the team to integrate education into their schedule – this way, professionals will not be pressured to enroll in extra-curricular studies.  
• Sending out a monthly newsletter that updates the team about the latest conferences, seminars, new book releases, online courses, and other learning opportunities.  
• Giving room for hands-on learning. A team manager should allow peers to shadow more experienced colleagues from other departments, in order to acquire new skills or get a deeper understanding of an employee’s daily tasks.  
• Adapting corporate learning to different education styles. Since there are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners, business owners need to adapt to differences in the way teammates grasp and retain information. By encouraging peers to complete learning-style-defining surveys and adapting their education based on provided insights, team leaders will improve the efficiency of learning.  
• Cultivating freedom to fail. Failure is a part of active learning – business owners need to be understanding of it. By encouraging employees to try original, out-of-the-box practices, managers will increase the odds of discovering efficient, innovative ways to acquire clients or facilitate project development. However, business owners need to be mindful of the uncertainty and high odds of failure that come along with experiments and accept these. 
• Creating learning opportunities for remote teams – online courses, subscriptions to e-learning platforms, etc. are a way for remote team managers to fuel employee development. 

Best HR Practices to Encourage Employee Development 

Besides investing in employee training and education, there are less direct ways in which employee development can be encouraged. Research shows us that 70% of learning on the job occurs informally, so leaders and managers should be careful to incentivize employee education with their everyday efforts. 

📚 Find out which management styles are best suited to facilitate your employees’ development. 

Ask your employees about training they need 

In order to provide the right employee training, you should first survey your employees about the education they prefer. Some people might naturally lean to online courses, while others learn better from live seminars. The educational preference is also suited to the type of work these employees are performing.

For example, if you are in the healthcare business, most of your employees need to take the NCLEX RN test. Do you know how to help them pass it?

Recognize your employees’ learning 

Since a lot of learning is informal, it would be good to incentivize the actions of learning and applying new knowledge. Employee recognition helps you encourage positive behavior, and helps you recognize your employees’ successes related to training, like finishing courses and getting college degrees. 

📚 Get our Employee Recognition Playbook and implement an Employee Recognition Program in your company. 

Provide constructive employee feedback 

In order to learn, your employees need to get a sense of their performance. Continuous employee reviews are a great way to always keep your employees motivated and productive. Positive employee feedback also facilitates learning because your employees embed new behaviors while performing a certain action. 

The Future of Employee Training 

Employee training is a way for business owners to build strong, knowledgeable teams that will be loyal to the workplace and deliver outstanding performance. There are plenty of ways to structure employee training within and outside the office – conferences, seminars, peer-to-peer interactions, books, online courses, and others. 

Take your time to find out which learning strategies are the most efficient for your team and implement these. The steps business owners take to educate employees typically pay off in just a couple of months – the improvements in employee morale and productivity will be worth your effort. 

This is why employee training and education will continue to be very important to companies that want to stay relevant in a very competitive world market. 

Anastasia Stefanuk 

Author Bio 

Anastasia is a passionate writer and Information Technology enthusiast. She works as a Content Manager at Mobilunity, a provider of dedicated development teams around the globe. She is fond of keeping abreast of the latest news in all areas of technology, Agile project management, and software product growth hacking, at the same time sharing her experience online to help tech startups and companies be up to date.