We are fast approaching the middle of the year and for many supervisors and employees, it is the period of semi-annual evaluations. This period is often the key moment for the company to take the pulse of each employee’s professional ambitions and their professional development plan.
The process is not new to many who, armed with Lominger’s FYI book or more recent work, attempt to have an open, frank and minimally biased discussion with their employee. In preparation for these meetings, today we take a more serious look at the question of training and development as a retention tool: how to retain your best employees while continuing to offer them advancement and opportunities to grow. ?
Even though the labor market favors them today, most employees see the existence of an obvious fact that refuses to give way: the professional development of each cannot be aimed at a straight line climb to the top. of an organizational pyramid often undergoing a slimming cure. Instead, the employee should rely on a combination of lateral and vertical movements that will maximize the acquisition of skills necessary for a possible higher level or a lateral position. Some will legitimately say that it is easier in a large company. Nevertheless, we can observe several SMEs innovating with incentive programs linked to new responsibilities (horizontal or vertical), something quite unique, often linked to the desire of the owner to ensure the continuity or the smooth transfer of his business.
However, many employees and supervisors are not necessarily prepared to invest the necessary effort. Talent development is a continuous process, with ups and downs, and its success cannot be reduced to a few hours training session in a classroom. Supervisors overwhelmed with operational tasks may be inefficient in the face of the necessary support for the employee in the design and implementation of his development plan.
Sometimes the manager and employee are unsure of their role in this process; they thus transfer the responsibility, subtly or not. In these cases, the employee is gradually disillusioned and the impression of making little or no difference leads to demotivation, up to a silent or real resignation.
Commitment to talent development must start at the executive level and transcend to all key departments. In medium and large companies in particular, it is imperative that the boots follow the chops in key moments, even during crises. Let us take the example of the strange restructurings where the positions sacrificed are those of the workers at the front while the executives of the hierarchical levels overlooking the action remain little or not affected. One can imagine the effect on the morale of the troops.
Obviously, artificial intelligence is already rapidly becoming a solution for concentrating human talent in the neuralgic and essential sectors of the company where old skills will make way for new ones. Along with training and development, these two solutions to the talent shortage are very real for companies despite their ugly flaw of requiring investments of time, money and energy. Within the business world, other reasons sometimes lead to approaching these solutions with an oblique look. Sometimes this challenge is related to the generational transfer of the company or other strategic considerations. In addition, others are counting on profound macroeconomic transformations for a reversal of the balance of power in the labor market in the long term. Let us think of the sweet dreamers of a Canada with 100 million inhabitants and a gigantic influx of a labor force as affordable as it is inexhaustible, ignoring the social and environmental problems that will result from it.
Nevertheless, for the vast majority of entrepreneurs, training and development remain a fundamental issue of the hour for the retention of talent. We’ve all heard the old formula of the entrepreneur fearing that his talented employees will be recruited by the competition, when the worst case scenario is that they will be overwhelmed and stay!
