How To Create an Employee Growth Plan

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One of the best moves to take your business to the next level is implementing an employee growth or employee development plan. With a proper employee growth plan, you ensure that all your employees (including your managers) have the skills that align with your business goals. This will eventually result in employees that are more productive and more profitable for your business.

Employee growth plans increase employee satisfaction as well. During your programme, some employees prove more hardworking than others and learn the necessary skills for higher positions. Getting a raise based on their proven skills through your growth programme will make them more loyal to your business.

Having an employee growth plan for your business is a no-brainer. But how should you go about it?

What Is an Employee Growth/Development Plan?

Employee development plans, aka growth plans, are co-created guidelines for your employees’ personal and professional growth. Growth plans come to shape through cooperation between employers, managers, and the employees themselves.

Growth plans can focus on your employees’ professional growth, like acquiring technical skills or improving performance. Or they could help grow social skills, company culture, leadership, and whatever else necessary to enhance employees’ soft skills.

So an employee growth plan could target different growth areas. In fact, developing multiple action plans in different growth areas has some serious benefits. Here are some of them.

1. It Improves Employee Fulfilment and Retention

Oliver Wyman’s A-Gen-Z Report says that Gen Z will quit unfulfilling jobs more than previous generations. In the UK and US, 70% of Gen Zers who consider themselves ‘loyal’ to their jobs are seeking a new job, either actively or passively. This signals a huge gap between how older generations and Gen Zers perceive fulfilment.

To close that gap, you can design a personal growth plan for each and every employee. It can both help them boost their career path and find fulfilment outside of work.

Darshan Somashekar, founder of Hearts.land, explains, “When you invest in your employee growth, it generates loyalty and reciprocity, and they will want to invest back in your company.”

An employee growth plan could also involve training more experienced managers. A leadership training programme, for instance, could focus on how to be more communicative and empathetic with younger employees. This individual yet inclusive approach is sustainable, because management would never lose touch with any team member.

2. Increased Employee Engagement and Creativity

Having multiple employee development plans in place is the best strategy to boost engagement and creativity. You can identify your teams’ strengths and weaknesses and come up with several areas of improvement. A systematic approach like this can help your people acquire a whole range of new skills.

The idea is also to help your employees navigate through change. A well-designed growth plan should help them realise what awaits them in the near future. For instance, 38% of millennials and 37% of GenZers predict that the major workplace shift in the next 10 years will be the heavy reliance on AI.

Your strategic growth plan should involve training on adapting to changing workplace conditions. Development plans can reduce work-related stress because they help resolve ambiguity. And being prepared and trained for the future helps boost employee empowerment. Your employees can be more confident in being creative and taking initiatives.

3. Helps You Plan for Future

A central pillar of strategic planning is HR forecasting. It helps decision-makers project and prepare for oncoming labour needs. And a combination of HR forecasting and employee development planning is the most sustainable strategy in every aspect.

With a smart game plan, you can identify emerging needs for different skill-sets. Then you can provide the training essential for employees to take on future roles. Every team member has to think on their tasks and responsibilities and how they may contribute to growth.

Say, for instance, you’re planning a switch to AWS Cloud. Instead of hiring someone with experience, you can have someone from your team trained on the transition. And employees who make an internal move are more likely to stay with you.

How To Create an Employee Growth Plan

The bottom line is you need several growth plans in place for different business objectives. So, how do you start?

Step 1: Determine Objectives and Goals

The first step is setting short and long-term goals. These objectives must be strategic, realistic, measurable, and with designated timeframes.

Growing revenue, for one, is a key goal for every business. But there is more than one path to revenue growth. In your employee development plan, you should:

• Consider a variety of strategies
• Identify the most effective and approachable ones
• Decide on one or more strategies based on available resources
• Set a course and timeframe for development
• Set goal-based KPIs

Next, you want to make sure the objectives you set align with your employees’ personal career development plans. For instance, if someone aspires to grow towards a management role, they will need to develop their leadership strengths. You can start by interviewing them about the skills that they want to work on. Then, you can think on how those desired skill-sets could contribute to your course.

It’s important to match the right people with the right roles, because such alignment and mutual understanding create unabating motivation and productivity. Plus it strengthens the sense of belonging to your organisation.

Step 2: Assess Employees (Skills Gap Analysis)

A skill gap analysis is understanding what set of skills your people should acquire. So far, you have asked for their self-assessment. Their answers are a great guide to getting started. But we need more evidence.

First, you can introduce several modern-day skills assessment tools to your employees:

• Virtual communication tools
• Online surveys and polls
• Game-based learning platforms
• Learning management systems
• Performance management tools

Employees can use these tools to keep track of their development. They make it easier to track growth metrics, and help avoid micromanagement. They also make learning more enjoyable for your employees.

Once data starts piling up, you need to analyse employees’ current skill levels. Based on the goals you have, you can decide which set of skills are more critical for your overall growth. And you must consider how demanding it is to acquire those skills.

Step 3: Determine Employee Growth Resources

Now you know what your people should put their focus on. You can let them choose from a variety of learning experiences that best meet their learning style:

• Online courses
• Internal process documentation
• Orientations
• Webinars and seminars hosting experts and consultants
• Peer-to-peer coaching
• Reading groups
• Mentorship programmes
• Task/job rotations
• Workshops and working groups
• Conferences
• Gamification training
• VR tools

Some of these channels are more expensive than others, like VR tools and conference tickets. But some of them are free, like peer-to-peer coaching, mentorship programmes, and many e-learning platforms. You can adopt several and still remain on budget.

Start with workflow documentation across your organisation. This helps your teams track their work in many scenarios. More importantly, it encourages a cross-learning experience where anyone can self-learn how things work across the organisation.

Encourage team members to share knowledge among themselves. Organise regular open forums on specific problems and development ideas. Make them feel comfortable about coming up with experimental ideas and solutions on strategic and everyday matters.

Step 4: Estimate Costs and Timeframe

One tricky part of creating an employee growth plan is setting a budget and a timeframe. The cost of any development program depends on technologies, external help, and the time that’s allotted to it. That’s why should consider a lot of things for an accurate estimation:

• Recurring cost of the tech stack you’ll build
• Less attractive but free alternatives to the software in your tech stack
• Expenses of physical events, like transportation and accommodation costs
• Outsourcing costs, like expert guest tutors
• Opportunity cost of the business hours spent on training
• Print and digital training materials
• Number of participants
• Duration
• Need for continuous training
• Industry standard for training budget
• Possible hidden costs

There is so much you can do even under a tight budget. For starters, you can invest in virtual training and reusable resources like video for upskilling employees. You can start with webinars and virtual meetings on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and more. These tools are either free or affordable, and accessible. Virtual meetings can also be recorded, so you can repurpose them in different forms.

Step 5: Create Incentives

Recognition and rewards are powerful motivational stimuli. Your employee growth plans should include a system for recognising and rewarding those who show improvement.

That’s why you have to keep track of:

• Courses employees complete
• Certificates acquired from high-authority institutions
• KPIs that indicate success in areas they’re working on
• Level of support and guidance they provide for co-workers
• Online and physical events they attend
• Number of development programmes they enrol
• Skill tests they take after they complete a programme

Once you assess their progress, let them know that you recognise their efforts. Organise monthly/quarterly meetings where you can highlight development milestones team members reach. Simply put a repeated event in the calendar and have a feedback session offline or using a video app or traditional phone. Give out attendance certificates, and monetary rewards to overachievers.

You can also offer tuition reimbursement, which is an incentive for continuing formal education. Higher education can bring invaluable knowledge and skills to the workplace. You can offer them tuition reimbursement and flexible work hours. This way they know that the time and money they invest in formal education are reimbursed and 100% favoured.

Keep in mind, your staff will be more enthusiastic about development when you also participate. Share your personal growth plans to set an example for them. This is a great way to show that your organisation values professional and personal growth.

Lastly, you can offer personal development funds. Employees can have access to these funds that they can use for any activity they want.

Personal funds are very effective in reducing work-related stress, burnout and exhaustion. They’re great incentives for supporting your employee’s mental and physical well-being. You can also offer sensitivity training, physical fitness programmes, and self-awareness workshops. These positive impacts of these programmes can encourage people to concentrate on self-improvement.

Conclusion

Employee growth programmes should be a regular part of your performance management strategy. Once you identify weak areas in your company’s overall performance, you should look for ways to improve them. This eventually boils down to how well your workforce (which includes leadership and management) performs. Providing the opportunity for employee growth and development guarantees an overhaul in your company’s performance.

Mentoring is a cheap and effective way for employee growth. It does not need much technological proficiency and could be adjusted based on each employee’s needs along the way. The interactive nature of mentorship programmes makes it possible for your employees to ask questions and stabilise their learnings.

To start with mentoring as an employee growth strategy you can use a mentorship platform like Pushfar to plan and run your mentorship programme, scale it and track your team’s performance as well.

This article was guest written by Mostafa Dastras.