When you’re staffing up a business, you can’t afford to ignore the future. You need to be thinking about what you’re going to need in a year, five years and ten years down the line. If you neglect to develop your workforce over this time, you’ll find yourself wasting time and money on high level hires which may or may not work out.
If you cultivate talent among your existing workforce you’ll be able to make internal promotions, and end up with people in senior positions with a deep understanding of your company, as well as top of the line skills. This doesn’t just have the direct impact those people make in those positions: it creates a rewarding culture in your company. When people see a path ahead of them in the business that could lead to them developing new skills, taking on new responsibilities and even breaking through into management, they are motivated to be more productive, and to remain with the business – avoiding the loss institutional knowledge that can cripple a small business if too many people leave at once. It can also make your business attractive to candidates when you are hiring.
It’s clear, therefore that having a good human resource development is vital for any company that’s thinking about it’s future. You need to begin by taking stock: employee appraisals can be awkward, cliched conversations, but as long as you are serious about developing your employees and have your HR team onside, you’ll gather valuable information.
From there you can work with your managers to develop plans for each person, giving targets and opportunities throughout the year to develop new skills, and then reflect on that year’s progress. You can see where employees have excelled, and where they may need more support, but it’s more valuable than that: your best employees will be deeply engaged with their field, and will have some useful suggestions for areas they wish to develop in. This grassroots level knowledge could blossom into the insight that will see your business succeed and that employee turbocharge their career with you.
If you develop your staff carefully you could find yourself appointing CTOs and CIOs from a pool of people who have worked with you from day one, and have a deep understanding of the needs of your business. This creates a close relationship with your senior managers, and employees that are eager to excel as they know that effort is rewarded.