A company’s greatest asset is its people, making it crucial to invest in their growth and development. This means helping employees deepen their knowledge and skills, gain confidence in their role and function, explore new areas of interest, and plan their career paths.
Offering growth and development opportunities demonstrates your commitment to helping employees reach their full potential. This creates a strong employee value proposition that will help you attract and retain top talent while boosting job satisfaction, improving retention, and building an engaged workforce committed to company success.
Let’s explore three proven strategies that enable employees to grow their skill sets and expand their professional horizons.
Cross-functional projects
Working on cross-functional projects is a great way for people to learn new skills or apply their skills in new contexts. Since each person brings unique skills, knowledge, and experience, this approach fosters innovation and creative problem-solving—often leading to more robust solutions. Team members gain confidence and feel empowered by contributing their strengths and expertise, breaking down silos, and building relationships across the organization.
Cross-functional projects are also an opportunity to gain new perspectives and a broader understanding of how different teams and functions fit together. This holistic view of how the organization functions can help employees be more effective in their own roles since they’ll be more aware of how they contribute to the business. Collaborating and building relationships with colleagues in other departments also promotes better alignment between teams, so that everyone is working in sync towards common organizational goals.
Research by Deloitte shows that cross-functional collaboration boosts employee engagement, motivation, and productivity. Additionally, companies can “utilize cross-functional teams to strengthen their talent retention efforts by cross-skilling individuals as part of their career development.”
Job rotation schemes
Job rotation allows employees to temporarily take up a different role or work in another department in order to acquire new skills and learn about other parts of the organization. This temporary assignment may last from a few weeks to several months, with the employee eventually returning to their original role with a new perspective and expanded skill set.
Employees benefit from job rotation because it’s an opportunity to immerse oneself in fresh challenges, explore new interests, and develop strengths in new areas. It prevents them from getting bored or stuck in a rut, and may even unlock new career pathways and facilitate internal mobility.
“By working across multiple departments, employees gain versatility through exposure to a diverse range of skills and experiences,” says Kelly Scheib, chief people officer at Crunchbase. “This not only enhances their professional growth, but also their personal development by providing a broader perspective on their goals and interests, and the various ways they can align with the company’s vision and mission.”
For the employer, a job rotation program builds flexibility for the company in case they need more staffing in a particular area in the future. It can also reduce attrition because employees can explore and potentially transition into new roles without leaving the organization. This helps retain institutional knowledge and build a loyal workforce and a cohesive company culture. Employees who have rotated through different roles are also likely to emerge as future leaders since they have a high-level understanding of how the company works.
Mentorship programs
Mentorship programs develop talent by pairing a junior employee with a more experienced one. The mentor shares their knowledge and experience, and the mentee benefits from guidance and feedback that will help them grow and develop in their roles while also thinking about career paths and goals. The mentoring relationship helps to pass down organizational values and institutional knowledge, which contributes to a more robust company culture and the development of future leaders.
The advice and encouragement of a mentor can have a tremendous impact on morale and motivation. According to a CNBC/SurveyMonkey survey on workplace happiness, employees with mentors are “significantly more likely to be happy with their jobs,” which bodes well for engagement and retention. About 71% of Fortune 500 companies have mentorship programs to develop high-potential employees.
Having a mentor is especially helpful for younger employees, new hires, women, and people of color. Research shows that mentorship programs increase promotion and retention rates for minority groups and boosts their advancement to managerial roles.
To be effective, mentorship programs should have a structured framework with clear guidelines and expectations for both the mentor and the mentee. People should be matched based on their willingness to participate and the compatibility between the mentee’s career aspirations and the mentor’s experience and expertise.
Setting employees up for success
Growth and development opportunities are essential to train and upskill talent and ensure retention in the long term. Companies benefit, too, by improving job satisfaction and productivity, identifying and developing future leaders, and building a more cohesive organizational culture.
To ensure the success of these programs, make sure you gather feedback on a regular basis so you can continuously iterate and improve on them. You should also track relevant metrics, such as project outcomes, productivity, job satisfaction, employee engagement, and more to measure the impact of these programs on participating employees. This data will also allow you to advocate for expanding and strengthening your employee development programs.
About Oyster
Oyster is a global employment platform designed to enable visionary HR leaders to find, engage, pay, manage, develop, and take care of a thriving distributed workforce. Oyster lets growing companies give valued international team members the experience they deserve, without the usual headaches and expense.
Oyster enables hiring anywhere in the world—with reliable, compliant payroll, and great local benefits and perks.
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