Engagement Driver 4: Opportunity

A culture of constant learning and development opportunities is created where people feel positive about their future career prospects

Engagement is increased when people have a positive expectation about their career opportunities within a business. In most organisations fewer than half of their people have a positive perception around their progressive career opportunities, whereas in best practice businesses, around 70 per cent of employees are hopeful about their future prospects within the business.

What if you don't train people - and they stay?
Focus on enhancing employees' strengths more than trying to improve weaknesses. Help your people identify their core skills (strengths) and work with them to continually develop and nurture them, then watch engagement increase.

Get clarity on what people want. Consider using a career development tool to fast track the process. Ask your people what opportunities and challenges they seek. Brainstorm job enriching ideas, even discuss openings with other managers to match any opportunities.

Where possible, recruit from within to reinforce the culture of opportunity and progress. Then make sure you tell everyone possible about it.

Grow or perish
Developing your people should be a never-ending educational and collaborative cycle. There are always innovations, new technologies and smarter ways of doing things popping up in our increasingly busy business worlds, so we need to keep our people ahead of the game, or find that:

• People are not being challenged and become stale and disengaged, or
• Our business stagnates because its employees are not invigorated by new knowledge and skills

Do your people feel:

• Optimistic and hopeful about their future career opportunities?
• A real effort is made to promote people by merit from within the organization?
• They have had at least one training opportunity to learn and grow in the last 12 months?

Do you ever get frustrated by the feeling that you train and develop your key people, simply in readiness for your competitors to poach them?

We've heard it all before, "I left for a better opportunity". The research shows that more than any other single factor, people stay engaged because of opportunities to learn and be challenged. Organisations need to be opportunist and help create the right opportunities for the right people at the right time so that people are engaged enough to stay another month, another year or another five years.

Keep developing your people, or develop increased turnover, the choice is yours.
People have an innate desire to grow and develop. Almost everyone wants to enhance their strengths and take on new challenges to be the best they can be.

If employees are not being developed and growing then they are not being the best they can be. If they are not being the best they can be, then they are not being as happy as possible and therefore employee engagement can be hugely affected.

Consider this, 41 per cent of employees at organisations with poor training plan to leave within a year, versus 12 per cent of employees at companies with excellent training. (Source: American Society for Training & Development)

What sort of talent development plan do you have for yourself and others?

Growing your biggest asset
In many companies more money is spent on recruiting people than for on-going training and development. What is more important; new people or retaining and developing existing employees? One of the most effective engagement returns on investment is growing and developing your existing people.

Best Employers invest more financial resources and time into developing their people than other companies. Companies in the top quarter of training expenditure per employee per year average 24 per cent higher profit margins than companies that spend less per year. (Source: Susan J. Wells, HR Magazine)