Kuljit Chadha is the Co-founder and COO of Disprz, and he relishes taking nascent technology products to new markets. As co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Kuljit has worked with over 100 L&D heads globally, assimilating a treasure trove of best practices in the process. He holds a master of business administration from the prestigious Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.
A very important and often overlooked factor that takes any business to the next level is having a good learning and development team. The one that lays importance on finding the right areas of improvement and what skills should be implemented that will help to get the desired growth for the business. Investing in one’s L&D team can be the make-or-break point in a company’s life.
The right L&D team can improve a company’s productivity as well as their revenue. Upskilling workforce not only leads to job satisfaction but also allows them to climb the company ladder.
Interestingly, during the Fourth Industrial Revolution, education and skilling played a key role in enabling innovation and adoption of newer technologies. Countries that produced highly skilled people could invent and discover much more and utilized the newer technologies learnt. Companies kept emphasizing the importance of learning and developing newer skills for advancement.
Therefore, the more you would invest in the L&D team, the more you are expected to get the best out of your employees by utilizing the newly developed skills. IBM puts this into perspective by estimating that each dollar spent on online education generates $30 in productivity. Further, the IBM study discovered that digitally trained upskilled staff members have enhanced their productivity by 10 percent more.
More than ever, businesses must make the most of their human resources by giving the appropriate individuals the right skills at the right time. The investment invested in hiring and attrition can be reduced or protected and be significantly reduced by embracing the correct amount of IT, soft skills, personalized and social learning, reskilling, enablement, and engagement.
One way to reduce the problem of talent attrition is to conduct one-on-one meetings. These interactions help shed light on the areas of concern that are faced by employees, as well as get to know what the aspirations of the employees are. These meetings help build a good relationship between the boss and his subordinates that could lead them in the right direction.
Good communication is giving feedback on the data collected by the skill gap analysis. In addition, bringing attention to the expectations of the business and the output by the employees. Another way to motivate an employee is to take up a course and show the benefits of how this could help him in the long run. The idea is to promote on-the-job learning that benefits both the employers and employees. With the emergence of new L&D platforms, providing digital skilling courses helps employees gain newer skills at their convenience.
Nowadays brands like Disprz offer various L&D programs that enable customization of the digital skills as required to meet the employee growth needs. Learning newer skills helps employees climb their corporate growth ladder and also helps the organizations in achieving their business goals. The new-age technology deployed in these L&D enables in providing a sense of being valued to the employees and also motivates them to enhance their productivity at work.
Let’s look at why investing the company’s resources into L&D can be beneficial not just to the employee but also to the organisation in the long run:
- Spotting future leaders
To build a company for expansion and evolution, it can be crucial to target people with the aptitude for future leadership. It is possible to find leadership talent through new recruits or by choosing current employees to be managerial candidates. Professional development programmes. Investing in potential leaders to scale the organization to new heights isn’t just beneficial to the company in the long run but to the employee himself as well
- Increases workplace engagement
Finding strategies to increase employees’ ongoing involvement can help in enhancing employees’ productivity instead of doing the mundane daily work, which provokes a sense of stagnation and no growth. Regular learning and development programmes can reduce inactivity at work, which in turn will support organisations in regularly re-evaluating their workforce, competencies, and operational procedures. In addition, it can trigger corporate analysis and planning since it requires employers to analyse current talent and evaluate growth and development potential internally rather than through recruitment, which will have an impact on company culture by putting a focus on planning.
- Strengthens workplace relations
Finally, giving your team members the chance to learn new things, developing their abilities, and broaden their knowledge will help them get closer as a unit. In these workshops, they will work together to overcome fresh difficulties. By collaborating with colleagues who have areas of expertise, they can also rely on one another for a variety of learning possibilities. Peer cooperation is their preferred mode of learning, according to research. Learning from each other’s strengths not only leads to a more well-rounded workforce, but those bonds can also improve retention and engagement.
In essence, if the company wants to see growth, not just in terms of revenue but also see future candidates that would expand the company to a larger scale, it is necessary to invest in the L&D. It would attract better employees as they would see themselves climb the corporate ladder within the company, it will also have a positive impact on the interpersonal relationships on the workforce that play a crucial role in the company’s success, as the saying goes “A well-oiled machine runs smoothly.”