Here’s a disturbing and somewhat disheartening statistic to consider: A recent Gallup survey found that less than half of employees surveyed (49%) felt “very confident” in their ability to reach their desired position in the company they work for.
Put another way, most of the people working for you aren’t confident they’ll eventually be promoted to the job they want to have, working for you, and since they feel that way, sooner or later, they’re going to start looking for other career opportunities that don’t involve you or your firm.
Clearly, that’s a problem, but what can be done about it? If you found the statistic above alarming, then you’re in luck because the rest of this piece will be devoted to providing you with tools you can begin putting in place, starting today, that will help bolster the confidence of everyone working for you, which will have the longer term effect of improving morale and productivity, while increasing retention rates. Let’s take a closer look!
Communication is Key
Before you can take concrete steps to assist the people in your employ, you’ve got to have a firm understanding of what their career goals and aspirations are. That’s going to mean checking in at regular intervals because of course, those goals and aspirations can and will change over time.
The simplest and most straightforward way to do this is to incorporate that conversation into your annual reviews, and once you have that information, it becomes a whole lot easier to begin working quietly to help your employees reach their career aspirations.
Make Training Resources and Mentorships Available
Perhaps the easiest thing you can do for all of your employees is, based on what they’ve told you their career goals are, make training resources and mentors available to them that will help them acquire the skills and experience they need to actually reach their stated goals. This isn’t as time intensive as you might think and will have a huge impact on morale as your employees will see tangible evidence that you listened to them when they outlined their career goals.
Incorporate Development into the Daily Work Routine
Training and mentoring can’t be something that occurs in isolation, or only on rare occasions. For it to be most effective, it’s got to be something that’s built into the fabric of a standard workday so that it occurs as a natural extension of getting the day’s work knocked out. It should be fairly easy and straightforward to find opportunities for an employee to work with a mentor on day to day tasks that will help provide the experience needed to move toward those aforementioned career goals.
Create A Clearly Defined Path
Another simple way to boost employee confidence is to clearly define the intermediate steps that lie between where the employee currently is with his or her current position, and where they want to ultimately end up.
Travel is always easier if you have a map, and that’s essentially what you want to create here, for your employees. A map that will enable them to step through the process of gaining all the experience they’ll need to arrive at their destination.
There are plenty of other things you can do, like gift one of our trending items and that will boost employee morale. But if you start with the items we just talked about, you’ll be miles ahead of your competition and you’ll have happier and more productive employees to boot!