Best practices for gathering employee feedback to promote upskilling and foster employee engagement.
Employee development, sometimes called professional development or upskilling, refers to how organizations support their workforce to acquire new skills and competencies. It’s evolved from a nice-to-have employee benefit to a key strategy for retaining, engaging, and recruiting new employees. And it’s easy to see why, with more job candidates seeking growth opportunities in their next position and more companies desperate to retain job hoppers (like millennials).
How did employee development become a key focus for so many HR teams and businesses? Let’s examine the benefits to explain this phenomenon.
Life for HR professionals has gotten a lot more interesting in recent years. Working to support the entire employee experience (EX) means coordinating and communicating development programs and tuition/learning benefits that can directly benefit the company’s bottom line.
The best employee development programs are customized to the needs of the individual rather than a one-size-fits-all offering. How will you know which types of learning opportunities are valuable to employees at an individual level? Here’s where employee voices and feedback across the organization come in.
Surveys for employee development are a natural starting point for creating a program or learning benefit. For example, you might want to gauge how satisfied current employees are with their career development opportunities—this career development survey template can be used for that exact purpose.
Employee development surveys are very useful tools for HR professionals; they’re a key way to uncover ongoing opportunities for job training or professional growth. Surveys also provide the quantitative and qualitative data that HR teams need at every stage of an employee development program, from program design to benchmarking progress to demonstrating ROI. Here are a few important ways HR teams use surveys for employee development programs, engagement, and employee experience.
The thread connecting these types of surveys is listening. Listening to employees is the only way to provide informed responses regarding development opportunities, engagement and culture initiatives, and overall EX improvements. In short, surveys provide the data backbone for insightful, employee-centric strategies.
Thoughtfully designed surveys provide the insights needed to enhance employee development and engagement. Follow these tips when creating, deploying, and acting on survey results.
It’s important to stress the value of analyzing your employee development survey results. Being thorough allows you to transform the survey data into credible insights that diagnose employee disengagement issues, validate theories, identify priorities, and shape decisions.
Now that we’ve given you five steps to implement and evaluate employee development surveys, let’s explore best practices to set expectations for employee participants while maximizing their engagement.
Well-designed employee development surveys are a strategic tool for gathering insights into the upskilling needs, priorities, and total experiences of an organization’s greatest assets—its people. When crafted thoughtfully, distributed regularly, analyzed, and acted upon, surveys supply the hard evidence to pinpoint strengths, diagnose trouble spots, and spark meaningful change.
Reliable employee perspectives dispel assumptions, sharpen development investments, elevate engagement and retention, and inform EX enhancement and talent strategy. In essence, organizations that consistently listen to their employees through recurring surveys demonstrate commitment to empowerment while shaping their futures based firmly on data-driven action.
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