Employee development is meant to grow any organization’s key asset: people! Regardless of the industry, employees are the ones who develop and carry culture, who influence a customer’s experience, and who determine the impact and effectiveness of an organization.
I work at a church which is an industry with a relatively short history when it comes to employee development. Thankfully as senior leaders, we have already decided to make employee development a significant part of what we do and I feel we have a fairly robust system in place to help employees grow. At the same time, it’s always good to hit pause, take a step back, and evaluate the effectiveness of what you are currently doing to see where they could be some improvements. This is what I’ve done as I’ve considered an outline of an employee development plan for our organization using technology.
Three components to this employee development plan include orientation, on-going coaching and onward focus. Development is crucial in each of these layers yet the implementation will look different.
Orientation
An employee will never be as disoriented as they are on their first day on the job. Effective leveraging of this disorientation would be to build organizational citizenship behaviour from day one. Understanding an organization’s mission, vision and values while in this state of heightened disorientation means the impact of these can be strengthened and deepened in the life of the employee. Understanding how staff values shape the way we interact with other staff, with congregation members and with community residents is an important factor in employee and organizational success.
Although personal contact and interaction is a priceless vehicle for delivering information, using video, websites and digital tools like Google Drive allows us to leverage technology in presenting mission, vision and values to new employees as part of their orientation.
Orientation also gives managers the opportunity to explain “standardization of work processes” (Damanpour, 1991, as cited in Kandampully, Belgian & Tingting, 2016, p. 158). Employees who understand these processes and the reasons behind them are then freed up to innovate within this common script or shared behaviour across the organization. As Kandampully, Belgian & Tingting affirm (2016), many contemporary organizations have a desire for innovation and employees (rather than managers) are often the right people to encourage, value and reward toward these new ways of thinking.
On-going Coaching
Once an employee is comfortable in their role on-going development moves from orientation to coaching. These should be regular and expected. Each employee knows that once a month they have a dedicated meeting with their manager to talk about their performance and give them an opportunity to ask questions.
Technology to track an employee’s progression on certain projects is definitely helpful when it comes to coaching and on-going development. Project management software like Trello or Asana can be used to facilitate this on-going coaching.
Coaching creates a culture where every employee is seen as valuable and has a voice to speak into the overall function of the organization. Opportunities for innovation and co-creation can often begin in these regular, expected, safe, trust-filled coaching conversations between managers and employees.
An employee who understands that their manager cares for them personally and not just for the work they do will become much more effective in both the work they are doing and in their effectiveness for the organization. As Dan Rockwell (2017) says, “Effective improvement is always self-development.” And this is a two-way street. As an employee improves under a manager’s coaching their desire for development increases. And as an employee is encouraged to grow and develop through coaching and challenges, their effectiveness will also improve.
Onward Focus
Along with orientation and coaching, there should be a desire that an employee would succeed within an organization and find a long-term opportunity as they continue to grow. Performance reviews can be part of seeing this happen but entering into conversations between the manager, the employee and senior leadership around possible career paths and succession planning become a key component of employee development.
Technology then becomes incredibly valuable for on-going education. If an employee is succeeding in a role but needs to gain skills to continue in their growth, online learning or video-based resources become so valuable to help the employee develop while not being forced to leave their current position or the organization.
Conclusion
Starting with the conviction that employees are the most significant asset in an organization, these forms of employee development including orientation, on-going coaching and onward focus help to promote organizational citizenship behaviour and innovation in a service-oriented culture.
Reference
Kandampully, J., Bilgihan, A., & Zhang, T. C. (2016). Developing a people-technology hybrids model to unleash innovation and creativity: The new hospitality frontier. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 29, 154-164.
Rockwell, D. (2017, March 5) The Anatomy of Performance Enhancing Coaching Conversations.
