7 Areas of Improvement for Employees

The recommended strategic tool for ensuring continuous growth throughout an organization is employee development. It contributes immensely to enhancing productivity and the retention of valuable employees.

Employee development is not optional because businesses are only as efficient as the employees they have. That’s why neglecting key challenges never bodes well for organizations as it makes the employee development process become unwieldy for them, frustrating employees and diminishing value to all parties.

Why Employee Growth is Important for Enterprises

The norm is now for businesses to develop employees instead of finding new staff to fit into their process and culture. Before providing a list of areas of improvement for employees, here are several reasons why employee growth and development matters in the modern business environment:

The need to remain competitive

Organizations are always aiming to win 100 percent of the market. Employees prefer to work with employers who place a premium on improving their skills for the modern marketplace.

Employees with superior skills can help your company deliver better performance that surpasses those from other companies.

To handle gaps in ongoing skills.

The SHRM skills gap research reveals that 83 percent of HR professionals have a hard time with recruitment. From this group, 75 percent believe candidates lack skills for job openings.

A short-term fix is for enterprises to reactivate entry-level job training schemes. But, they can look to the future by participating in community partnerships to rebuild the broken talent creation system.

To foster an agile learning culture.

Today’s model enterprise needs to be active in enabling employees to adapt to new environments. An agile learning culture can also help employees to show they can quickly adapt to new environments, paradigms, and market demands.

To adopt changing business structures.

As enterprises aim to be leaner and flatter, with a knack for continuous evolution, employee development becomes necessary to guarantee engagement and commitment. Creative employee development communicates to employees that executives value their input.

The need to improve employee productivity

Workers are more productive and beneficial when they receive relevant education and training for their role.

The need to lower employee turnover

Employee training and development costs money, and companies may worry that highly skilled people will leave, possibly taking valuable knowledge to competitors. Yet, the research suggests that the opposite actually happens as absenteeism and turnover actually reduce.

7 Essential Areas of Employee Improvement

Understanding key development areas are necessary for highly effective contributions or a successful career. Knowing what to improve is valuable in performance reviews or feedback to team members.

Feedback should be active by aiming at each individual depending on three metrics: impact, growth, and overall performance.

These are suggested areas of improvement for employees, even when feedback is work-specific, skill-specific, and role-specific:

1 – Customer service

Customers are the soul of any business, but good customer service is a significant index of a company’s reputation. It also determines if a business is able to win repeat customers.

Customer service cuts across all job types, including those that are not explicit customer-facing roles. For instance, your employees may not realize that customer service also applies to working with colleagues.

2 – Communication skills

Communication takes three forms:

• Verbal
• Written
• Non-verbal

Proper communication enhances individual productivity and organization. Empathetic communication also helps to improve the morale of everyone in the workplace.

3 – Accepting feedback

Giving and receiving feedback is critical for growth. However, it takes many spoonfuls of practice to accept and apply helpful feedback. While the discipline is challenging to sustain, it helps people make quality decisions and improve performance.

4 – Problem-solving

One of the defining characteristics of high-value employees, the ability to identify issues, access options, choose one (or more) viable solutions, and implement them, is rare. Strong problem-solving skills can help to resolve difficult projects, achieve goals, and even resolve conflict.

5 – Leadership

Leadership is necessary to achieve goals, solve problems, and communicate with associates. Such skills allow individual contributors to host successful meetings or collaborate with others to reach a common goal.

6 – Active listening

Effective listening is essential for communication and success in business. Employees with mature listening skills will communicate better, make fewer mistakes, and improve their productivity.

Customers can sense when someone is genuinely interested in their plight, and the happier the customer is with your service, it’s more likely that they will be happier.

7 – Professionalism

Professionalism involves knowing what comprises appropriate behavior in the workplace and exhibiting it. Your employees can become more professional by paying attention to colleagues and following industry standards.

These seven employee development areas examples are only a few of the available employee development suggestions for your HR team.

Choosing the Areas of Employee Improvement at Your Company

While there are more areas of employee improvement than this guide could possibly capture, it’s often a challenge for companies to choose which one to work on.

Human Resources should tackle employee improvement one step at a time. A three-step approach to determining what areas are high-priority includes:

1. Encouraging employees to self-check by writing out their workplace challenges.
2. Asking employees to collect feedback from colleagues.
3. Ensuring that employees spell out their goals for seeking specific areas of improvement.

Selecting areas of improvement should be an experience that aims for growth. It should not be a negative perception of the current situation.

Conclusion

As your company strives to maintain its competitive edge, improving the quality of each employee enables them to remain relevant contributors to engineering innovation at your company. Providing employee development opportunities makes this possible.

If you want to learn more about employee development, you can check out our blog posts here.