Workforce as an asset,not an expense
Organisations must seek to turn their workforce
into a valuable, long-term asset to the business,
instead of seeing workers as interchangeable units
and just a cost that must be kept to a minimum.
Source: World Economic Forum
Employees want access to training that will enhance their skills and talent value. To keep their best employees, businesses must provide strong pathways for career progression – giving employees the opportunity to move forwards or sideways into roles where they can excel.
Reskilling and upskilling programmes are core tactics of this strategy, and they are beneficial to both business and worker: 75% of completed reskilling and upskilling programmes are economically positive.
As well as boosting the bottom line, development training is also the best way to ensure staff retention and secure a host of other benefits:
According to IES research, the proportion of people in work who are receiving job training is falling. In 2005, roughly 30% of UK employees were receiving training. Today, the figure is around 25%. UK businesses are failing to provide the role-related upskilling and reskilling that employees need to remain competitive, but according to McKinsey, the productivity rate for reskilled and upskilled employees increases by an average of 12% per worker.
Well trained, highly motivated and enthusiastic employees are the most valuable assets in any business. Organisations that would not hesitate to upgrade technologies or production machinery to achieve higher returns should consider their best workers in the same vein – give them what they need to thrive to gain a latent boost in productivity.
Offering training and skills development initiatives as an integral part of your culture enhances corporate EVP – your employer value proposition, the secret sauce that makes job candidates decide they want to work for your company.
Businesses that provide reskilling and upskilling initiatives for their workers can increase their ESG reputation – a key driver for EVP and the willingness of other entities to do business with you.
Training to build worker skills can pay off in more ways than one. However, organisations must have full sight of the outcomes to be achieved before they can implement the training solutions that will successfully provide the skills they need.
The outcome will shape the approach to training and the type of implementation model employed. Employers must also be aware of where the outcome will sit within the organisation’s ESG policies. Reskilling programmes will typically have little effect on environmental or governance rules, but they can have major impact on the social element. Outcomes must be aligned to support the organisation’s social policies as well as goals discovered by a process of internal investigation that includes:
A total skills assessment – what skills do you already have?
Plotting a long-term workforce strategy – what skills will you need in the future?
Talent mapping – what is required to upgrade the skill sets of selected employees?
Time, training and incentives for middle managers – they are the linchpin to success.
Aligning reskilling resources – how will you secure the training you need – internal/external/both?
The soft skills in high demand:
Collaboration and teamwork
Accountability and reliability
Initiative-taking
Critical thinking and analysis
Resilience and adaptability
Reasoning and problem-solving.
Source: ManpowerGroup
Making more of the best workers you have can be a faster and better way to support your business. Follow these seven steps to revolutionise the way you train – and retain – your workforce.
1
Conduct a granular skills inventory to determine the skills your business already has.
2
Match your organisational plan to a workforce skills plan. To achieve your organisational goals, what skills are you missing now, and more importantly, what skills will you need to deliver the achievements you are aiming for in 5, 10 or 20 years?
3
‘Build’ is the most effective option when skills are rare in the market, and they are core to your strategy and competitive advantage. As buying talent becomes unworkable due to shortages and spiralling compensation expectations, building allows you to create the skills you specifically need in the quantity you need within your strategic timescale.
4
Many training programmes fail because the employees become disaffected and drop out of the course. Motivators – in the form of incentives that reward an employee with greater opportunity, or where the employees are offered promotion but can only achieve this if they pass the training – are essential to ensure participation.
5
Managers are the talent scouts within your organisation. They are in the best position to identify and reskill potential talent. They must be offered suitable incentives, be adequately trained and held accountable by way of monitoring and regular one-to-one check-ins with the internal talent team.
6
Deliver the right experience to deliver the right outcome by offering:
Exposure to ensure the job the individual is being trained for is an appropriate fit
Education to give individuals the skills they need to do the job
Experience to be successful within the job.
7
Successful training programmes are always a work in progress, with room for continuous improvement. Upon completion of each campaign, analyse the results to enhance the next training cycle.
Creating a culture where employees feel they belong and can grow begins with building an inclusive workplace and giving workers space to thrive.
Organisational change and strong employee retention are closely connected. How businesses manage such change can significantly impact their ability to retain key employees:
Reframe the organisational mindset to break barriers and eliminate career ceilings
Two thirds of UK workers say workplace DEIB is important when deciding if they should stay or go. Employees are looking for roles where career progression will not be hampered by bias or out-of-date cultural norms. Increasingly, they will not tolerate racial, gender, age, religious or other barriers to moving on and moving up.
Career ownership
Giving workers the freedom and support to shape their career and work-life balance can increase job satisfaction and drive strong retention. Organisational initiatives should aim to turn ‘this is what our workers want’ into ‘this is how we give it to them’.
Providing the right remuneration
Loyal employees can often feel that their level of compensation is falling behind market rates by staying in their current job. Balancing the pay of retained workers to match the salaries offered to new recruits may require adjustments in organisational budgets, but it is a necessary action to support worker retention.
Businesses must encourage their staff to take a proactive approach to learning and upskilling, to understand and drive their own career growth.
Support ongoing talent development process with elevated career conversations skills for individuals
Enable managers to shift mindset from immediate needs to broader talent goals on behalf of the organisation as a whole
Create confidence across the organisation in commitment to lndlvldual growth. resulting in higher retention rates
Develop and deploy programmes that address specific needs of targeted groups to accelerate career progression.
The first component for success is perhaps the most foundational and the most challenging, and that is to establish a skills classification which is:
Research-based
Up-to-date and relevant
Easy to understand
Ethically designed
Comprehensive research followed by real-time fine-tuning will enable organisations to understand the level of skill needed for a particular role or project, and to see how different skills interact with each other to get the job done.
Once this level of insight has been achieved, skills can be used as building blocks for projects and employees can be effectively matched to suitable work.
Businesses need to know which skills their employees actively want to develop and give them the tools to do so.
Employees must be provided with scope for growth and ongoing development – as 81% now expect training programmes from employers to help keep their skills up-to-date.
A final key component of successfully integrating a skills-based mindset is selecting and hiring employees who are committed to refining and developing their skills on an ongoing basis. 65% of employees who received coaching support said it improved one or more of their professional skills, while 67% believe coaching enhanced their overall job performance.
A leading financial services company had experienced years of high recruitment costs associated with restructuring activity. To counteract this situation, they introduced an ‘internals first’ philosophy which focused on the redeployment and internal mobility of talent. The objective was to reduce costs associated with career transition and to retain and engage their existing employees.
The organisation also had a drive to recognise diversity and unconscious bias, creating an opportunity to address the nature of conversations held around career development, particularly those of women.
Partnering with Talent Solutions Right Management, the organisation implemented a ‘Leader as Career Coach’ programme for over 100 managers. The interactive webinars were complemented by one-to-one sessions with a career coach to help line managers develop the necessary skills to run effective career conversations, and to equip them with the tools and knowledge to handle difficult conversations in the event of business change. Following the line manager programme, the organisation saw increased redeployment into internal roles, and a shift in mindset towards a more agile workforce and lifelong learning.
In a large UK bank, 26% of employees were over 50 years of age and 37% of them were senior managers – with this figure increasing at 1% per year. The organisation had an urgent need to address the challenge of employees in later careers not sharing their retirement plans: it was not unusual for an employee to leave with only one month’s notice after 30-35 years of service, with no exit plan or a system to transfer valuable knowledge in place.
The organisation implemented a programme of line manager training to encourage open career conversations with employees when their next career step is beyond ‘traditional employment’. This created an honest, two-way relationship between organisation and individual, allowing for transparent conversations around new ways of working, and a smooth transfer of knowledge if the employee chose to retire. Following the training, the bank experienced an 83% take-up of later career services, and learned that later careers programmes don’t just mean retirement – with 35% of delegates using programme tools, resources and coaching for career advancement rather than retirement.
One of the many challenges in implementing effective skills mapping is that organisations typically use systems that are designed to drive organisational data, not employee experience. These methods of entry are often unsuccessful, as employees see no individual benefit. Employee experience must sit at the heart of any skills mapping system that organisations choose to implement.
Manpower worked with a manufacturing business that had previously tried to gather skills data for personal development planning processes via their Human Resources Information System (HRIS). The project had been unsuccessful, as employees complained that it was too cumbersome, and they were not motivated to enter any data.
The organisation went on to implement a more employee-centric approach, using technology that provided opportunities for career planning and engagement with upskilling initiatives. The business saw a 12% rise in internal mobility and achieved significant savings on their recruitment costs.
