Last Updated on October 27, 2021 – 6:56 am

Linear thinking in business focuses on investing in the things that offer direct payoffs and have a positive impact on the bottom line. However, such traditional thinking has grave limitations. A company needs to consider lateral forms of investment in their people. After all, processes are pointless without people well-equipped to see them through.

It’s all right for a business to pour resources into advertising, R&D, partnerships, security, social media, and technology (to name only a few). They could also go further to channel resources to make their employees better for the greater good. These are the people who give their best time, talents, and energy to ensure your organization succeeds and meets its vision.

This article delves deeper into why you need to invest in employee development.

Why Should You Invest in Employee Development?

#1 – The cost of hiring new employees is high and sometimes indeterminable.

It can cost as much as two times employee salaries to hire replacements. Building good relationships with employees can take several forms, including investing in their talents. If they slip through your fingers with all they’ve learned, you’ll also be prepared to bear the cost of recruiting and training new employees.

Investing in employees from the outset is the surest way to prevent turnover. Here are a few ways to go about this:

  1. Show them your core business values in relatable ways.
  2. Show them how their role fits into the overall mission of the business.
  3. Ensure they have the time and multiple avenues to ask questions.
  4. Create opportunities to interact with the rest of the team.

#2 – It improves communication on every level.

Poor communication is more harmful than companies seem to realize. One research covering 400 major companies showed that besides other adverse outcomes, poor communication results in a misdirection of employee efforts and talents. Monetary costs can amount to millions of dollars per year.

Employee development should include relevant and comprehensive training, informational materials, and everything else necessary to make good decisions and be effective.

#3 – It promotes employee promotability.

The ability to retain employees is a big task for organizations. However, there’s the big issue of promotability. It’s advisable to hire managers and other upper-level employees from within.

It’s a no-brainer to increasingly empower those who have a relationship and familiarity with your customers and general business practices. However, these employees need adequate preparation to fill those higher positions with minimal hitches.

Here are a few ways that an employee development program can help promote employees in status and responsibility:

  1. Create a stream of capable workers.
  2. Prime workers for promotion.
  3. Help to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in your employees.

Employee development trains your current employees for future higher opportunities. It also reveals which employees have the aptitude and capacity for promotion. Training is a more reliable tool to learn about strengths and weaknesses in training instead of on the actual sales floor with actual customers.

6 Reasons to Invest in Employee Development

#4 – It improves innovation and performance.

Companies need to have a strong culture of investing in human transfer. Continuing education efforts at work deepen industry learning for college graduates who find themselves in the modern workplace.

Positive firm performance is a direct outcome of human resource transfer. An instance implementation is when companies employ recent graduates, they should provide their employees with further vocational training. It produces performance benefits through innovation outcomes, leading to sales growth and improved productivity levels.

#5 – Continuous employee development helps retain motivated employees.

Staff members are a dozen times more likely than to leave a company where they have a job but aren’t quite advancing in their careers, according to one IBM study. Motivated employees can earn training and growth opportunities from companies to help them remain relevant.

Key training opportunities include:

  1. How to identify and innovate team collaboration strategies
  2. Creating processes for problem-solving
  3. Developing open communication protocols to inculcate team structure
  4. Coordinating channels to interact with other teams in the company
  5. Establishing plans for delivering information to stakeholders or clients

#6 – It fosters a futuristic outlook.

Because employee development is continuous, it’s always looking to address future needs with current insights. Important questions to consider include:

  1. What type of leadership will the company need?
  2. What will the organization’s customers need from employees?
  3. What industry changes are possible from training opportunities?

Employees are significant to a company’s answers to these questions; therefore, their development and training are critical to these.

Thinking ahead is what these forces help companies to achieve because employee development programs don’t happen without planning. Training needs to be bleeding-edge to be relevant, and business culture quite certainly depends on a company’s customers and industry needs.

Conclusion

A viable employee development plan is crucial to the fortunes of a company. These six reasons for investing in employee development are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to positioning a company for an excellent employer reputation and as a market leader in its industry.

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