Employee engagement.
As a HR professional, you’re constantly thinking about ways to improve it. You strategize about infusing it through your recruitment marketing campaigns. You harness it to blast candidate attraction and entice the best talent. And you leverage it during the onboarding process.
But then what? Does employee engagement stop mattering once they’ve got their feet under the table?
We talk about the ‘new hire glow’. But, is there a specific moment, consciously or subconsciously, when an employee’s status shifts from avid newbie to plodding old hand? There isn’t. But it begs the question – How do you keep that freshness alive amongst employees who have been with you for two years, five years, ten years and beyond?
It doesn’t stop mattering, unless you think a continuously revolving door of employees is good for business. So, it’s invaluable to put more time and effort behind existing employee engagement, especially in light of unnerving post-Covid stats around The Great Resignation.
Learning and development helps you punch hard amongst the existing employee demographic. As Harvard Business Review’s Erica Keswin explains, “…on-the-job professional development is a nearly perfect solution to many of the problems facing companies today. Why? … your people want it. The 2022 LinkedIn Global Talent Trends Report found that employees believe professional development is the number-one way to improve company culture.”
Curious? Read on…
How Does Employee Engagement Confirm and Amplify Your EVP (Employer Value Proposition)?
A sense of belonging and inspiration is at the beating heart of employee engagement. To this end, successful employee engagement is built around ensuring your employees understand your EVP and how their roles fit in.
Neelie Verlinden at the AIHR listed the five key elements of an EVP, as distinguished by management consulting giants Gartner, which are –
- “Compensation”
- “Work-life balance”
- “Stability”
- “Location”
- “Respect”
She went on to describe the stability category, “…as in career stability, opportunities for your employees to further their career, develop themselves and employee training. Naturally, this is where your learning and development efforts come into play as well as possible mentoring/coaching initiatives you’ve developed within the organization”.
In short, your EVP is a set of promises that you make to your people, from their very first touchpoints. And there isn’t a watershed moment when those promises automatically fall by the wayside and don’t apply anymore.
So, learning and development is a failproof way to continuously demonstrate that you’re delivering on your promise to employees, whether they’re fervent new recruits or part of the furniture.
In addition, reinforcing your EVP this way boosts employee engagement in many other compelling ways.
Why is Learning and Development SO Powerful for Employee Engagement?
Better employee enagement generates a workforce that’s motivated to work together, across all levels, towards shared goals. And, as we’ve already established, learning and development is a killer part of it.
Why? Because upleveling their skills, so they can put what they’ve learnt to practical use, keeps things fresh and inspiring. It also ensure they see how their role fits into your OKRs and drives your KPIs. This embeds their sense of belonging even more deeply.
It brings a multitude of benefits with it, for example –
- A More Polished Performance – It’s a double whammy. When your employees are equipped with more hard and soft skills, they’ll thrive in thire roles, and the business as a whole will thrive.
- Improved Retention Rates – Learning and development is your secret weapon for bringing those pesky staff attrition rates right down – even if you’ve experienced rocky patches before! Erica Keswin in the Harvard Business Review spelt out, “A recent survey from Better Buys found that employees who get professional development opportunities are 15% more engaged and have 34% higher retention than those who don’t.”
- Boosted Employer Branding – When you earn great employee engagement, you’re on to a winner. They’ll return your investment in their success with the investment of their energy and loyalty, towards their own roles, their teams and the overall business.
It ticks every box. But there’s just one potential catch with learning and development – and that’s getting it right. You won’t achieve amazing results by just putting employees on training courses randomly, for the sake of it, without being completely intentional about your who, what, where, when and why.
And this is where an outstanding LMS can knock it out of the park for you.
How Can a Transformational LMS Supercharge Employee Engagement?
A powerful LMS isn’t just a system to help you plan and deliver training to your employees, (though it’s platinum standard at this for sure). Additionally, it equips you to continue their development, with customized learning paths, including self-paced resources and blended learning programs where applicable.
In a nutshell, it tools you up to –
- Identify skills gaps
- Deploy relevant training
- Track progress and results
And better still, you can achieve this effortlessly, across a personalized mix of training types, including –
- In-person training that can’t be conducted remotely, e.g. certain types of on-the-job training or in-person attendance at a relevant training course or seminar
- Blended learning of in-person instruction coupled with accompanying or complementary online training modules
- Virtual training, comprising external or in-house content, that employees can work through on their laptops, phones or tablets, at the own pace, in the workplace, at home or elsewhere.
It’s said that knowledge is power. And it’s 100% true in terms of employee engagement. Having a program of ongoing learning and development means that longer standing employees are continuously replenishing their knowledge banks. At the same time, you’re simultaneously safeguarding against their heads being turned by appealing new challenges elsewhere.
At HireRoad, Learn by HireRoad, our game-changing LMS, can be used alongside recruiting software Recruit by HireRoad, You can use both in tandem to fully benefit from our holistic approach to talent acquisition and retention. Or Learn by HireRoad can be used just as effectively on a standalone basis. It includes a massive library of existing recognized training courses that can be incorporated quickly and stress-free.
Are you wanting to introduce learning and development in to your business, ramp up your existing activity, or unhappy with a current provider? Let’s arrange an initial chat.