All staff need to be developed as the business grows and changes. There is nothing worse that a staff member who has worked for a business for many years and only has one month’s experience, just repeated 12 times each year over and over again. People like to grow and learn new things. Constant growth allows the business as a whole to grow and thus makes those larger changes easier to manage.

Staff are individual and thus require individual development programmes. We have a staff ‘red book’ that allows each member to plan their year ahead in the form of goals, dreams and hopes. We then work with then at monthly coaching sessions to help them realise their plans for the year. We assist in recommending online or classroom-based courses, hold them accountable for actions and support them through times of hardship that may come up. Theses coaching sessions are held in confidence and have nothing to do with work base assessments or salary increases.

There are so many online training programmes, journals and resources that allow for different facets of personal and skill based development. Many ebooks and audio books can be downloaded and distributed to staff for reading.  I personally commit to three online university courses per year and allocate myself a strict reading programme of one business book per month. Other companies have a reading club for their senior management that they then share the key points of their assignments to the others at a weekly or monthly session.

Learning and development are habits that need to be instilled into every job level in your business. But it does not stop there, people need to be held accountable for things they are assigned, more on this in our next post. What are you doing with your staff?