With its broad range of training opportunities, educational support programs, and skills improvement courses, Afghan Wireless Communications Company is proud to be one of Afghanistan’s leaders when it comes to employee development. Ehsan Bayat, founder and CEO of Afghan Wireless, is a long-time proponent of the great value that employee development can bring to individual workers and businesses alike, as well as to the health and progress of the local economy.
However, in order for employees and their companies to reap the maximum benefit from employee development programs, it’s critical that companies organize and implement these initiatives effectively. Many businesses launch employee development programs with the best of intentions, but their efforts are not as successful or impactful as they could be due to a few basic, but unfortunately common, mistakes, including the following:
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Not providing development incentives
Workers have a great deal to gain from development programs, but not every employee will recognize this fact from the outset; indeed, some employees may resent development or training initiatives as just another obligation in their already overburdened schedules.
To combat this perception, it’s important that companies provide employees with proper incentives and motivation for participating in development efforts. These can take many forms, from rewards when employees achieve particular goals or reach designated milestones as a result of the training to assigning new and more engaging responsibilities following the training. In addition, it’s important for companies to ensure that employees understand why the business is implementing development programs, and what the desired outcomes are for the employee and the company alike.
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Not making development available to all employees
Companies often make the mistake of concentrating development efforts on their most senior employees, such as executives or managers, or their employees who are most obviously struggling with their responsibilities. But in fact, all employees stand to benefit from development programs; indeed, one of the main advantages of such programs is that they allow employees to come together in a novel way and build new, stronger working relationships with each other in a different context. If development initiatives are confined to just one particular group, companies run the risk of isolating or alienating other employees, or of not providing development support to employees who may need it even if their work doesn’t show it.
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Designing one-size-fits-all programs
While it’s important that development opportunities be available to all employees, that doesn’t mean that just one training style is appropriate for everyone. Companies need to be ready to tailor their development programs according to their employees’ (and, indeed, their own) capabilities, needs, and goals. Otherwise, the program is likely to be of minimal benefit.
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Not making learning and training relevant to real employee responsibilities
One key way to prevent employee development programs from falling into the one-size-fits-all category is to ensure they are highly relevant to employees’ actual tasks and responsibilities. If employees have a hard time seeing how they can use the knowledge the development program provides in their everyday work, then they will have little motivation to apply themselves to learn it.
Note, however, that this does not mean that an employee development program needs to be specifically about employees’ daily tasks; rather, it should focus on making sure the skills they are learning or developing are transferable to that context. For example, one of the employee development programs sponsored by AWCC was a seminar course on understanding how different situations can inspire fear or anger, and how to develop strategies to resolve those feelings. Though this might seem like an unusual fit for employees of a telecommunications company, this knowledge is in fact a critical component of good communication between employees and clients. It is also key to promoting a good working environment, and is thus highly relevant to the everyday working situation of these employees.
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Overwhelming employees with too much information
One critical mistake that employee development programs often make is trying to cram too much in over too short a period of time. Companies need to remember that they can’t cover all possible aspects of employee development in the course of a single workshop.
Instead, it’s best to choose one key outcome, goal, or skill, and concentrate on helping employees engage with it in a comprehensive, in-depth way. This will contribute more effectively to long-term knowledge and skills development. In addition, it will prevent employees from shutting down during training because they simply can’t absorb any more information.
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No follow up
There’s only one surefire way for a company to know whether or not its development efforts were effective for employees: ask them! Employee feedback on development programs and initiatives is hugely valuable for companies because it helps clarify what worked, what didn’t work, and what assistance, knowledge, or skills employees feel they still need. There’s little sense in repeating a program that didn’t work, so companies need to be sure they are following up with employee participants in order to make future programs even better.