Working methods are now undergoing a comprehensive change, moving away from traditionalism for many professions. We are undoubtedly trying to understand these new dynamics and trying to produce a version that suits us. However, there is one issue that we often overlook, postpone thinking about and sometimes do not care about: Investing in employees.
Our ultimate goal while doing business is clear: to be successful. To do this, we bring people from different age groups together to benefit from their experiences, we combine different schools and approaches in the same pot, and we strive to produce a result around a common idea.
Moreover, while doing this, we are not only thinking about what we have but also the jobs we will take in the future, we are acting, taking a stance, continuing to learn and follow innovations. In short, what we are doing is managing the human resources we have in a comprehensive and inclusive manner.
The goal is similar on the employee side too; to be successful. In order to be successful, people now prefer to be in organizations that offer new and better opportunities and, if possible, have a plan to realize them.
When we look at it from the business side, there is a common and quite big mistake: developing a strategy for employees to develop their professional lives and allocating resources to it is seen as a dead investment. However, this approach benefits employees and makes significant contributions to companies in the long term.
Developing skills and increasing knowledge
I would like you to ask yourself this question right now: are you in the same place you were working ten years ago, and what has changed since then?
If I were to answer this question on my own behalf, it would not be wrong to say that the first of the biggest changes — and relatively far behind — is the repositioning of vector and raster-based design programs on the market to cloud-based, and the second is the elimination of the need for these programs and perhaps even photo cameras.
If you accept this, you will be more comfortable with the fact that no matter where and what you do, you can be sure that the path to the result in your work has somehow changed, or at least has started to change, with a better estimate.
Whether you want to keep your current job or look for a new one, it is necessary to acquire new knowledge and develop skills in order to catch up with this change.
Increasing work motivation and job satisfaction
You need to separate the satisfaction in your work life from your personal life. Providing employees with development opportunities related to their work primarily makes them feel valued. Feeling valued is directly related to high motivation and is a situation that strengthens commitment to work and general happiness in the work environment.
The equation is simple: employees who feel valued where they are tend to stay longer in their place of employment. This reduces the rate of turnover, and reduces the costs of recruiting, orientation and starting new personnel. It reduces the possibility of bottlenecks that are likely to occur in these units, especially in terms of the movement of production units.
In short, the functioning of business life is not much different from the rest of the world; the turnover rate of employees who are educated in high-demand fields decreases. What should not be forgotten is that no one is indispensable to any place anymore, and there is no guarantee that employees will be where they are tomorrow.
Employee retention and strengthening employee loyalty
The search for career advancement and promotion is always on the mind of every talented employee, and everyone has a plan for the future in their minds, and what people expect from their working lives is now much more than the paradox of bread and butter.
Strategies such as organizing workshops for employees, initiating mentoring programs and leadership programs, and drawing roadmaps for employees with their careers are some of the behaviors that strengthen teamwork, develop expertise, and ultimately support talent to stay within the company as long as possible, and such initiatives are quite valuable in terms of understanding the values of companies and concretely revealing what their goals are.
It is very common for companies to transfer employees from one another today, and no matter how you look at it, transferring to competitors is a unique opportunity for employees to advance in their jobs. This ensures that the idea of developing their own leaders is becoming more and more dominant for organizations that want to avoid losing their employees to other companies or, in the worst case scenario, to their competitors.
The point that needs to be underlined is this; It seems more costly to hire an employee who is already trained and armed with new knowledge and have him or her stay in-house than to upgrade an employee already working in the organization through an in-house program.
Increasing innovation and creativity
I am also talking about nurturing a culture that we call innovation while working. Employees who add new things to their knowledge are likely to develop more effective solution ideas for the work they do — or the problems they encounter in terms of the process — and their potential to produce new ideas is also higher.
Although it seems to be mostly related to jobs with visual or auditory outputs, being creative while working and discovering shortcuts to get results now provides a significant advantage to both employees and the companies these employees work for in the business world. This could be developing skills in a software used in the preparation of financial statements or discovering a method that will provide fuel efficiency while using a construction machine.
Understanding that new generation employees can no longer be satisfied with money alone and keeping this fact in mind, developing jobs and solutions is one of the keywords that will make their job easier. People in this group are not content with regularly increasing salaries, they are aware that the skills required for work need to change and for this reason they definitely want to make room for learning in their working lives.
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Investing in employees used to be an approach that companies used to take on and did not hesitate to use when doing PR, but it is now becoming a norm. On the other hand, it is clear that companies that stay up-to-date and increase the capabilities of their employees are different in the market; it seems difficult for those who fall behind in this race to maintain their stability and continue their existence.
Now, if you are a business owner, the question you should ask yourself is not how much budget you should allocate for training, but deciding which trainings would be more appropriate for which personnel...
