While equity and infrastructure are both important for the operations of your business or start-up, the real assets to maintain should always be your employees. Giving employees enough room to grow and pushing them to be better are the two things every business must do in order to continue to grow exponentially.
There are a lot of things you can do to help grow your employees in terms of skills and experience. These next few ideas we are about to discuss in this article will help you get started.
Send Them to School
A lot of people who are working as an employee are actually aspiring to go back to school and pursue a higher degree. As a business, you can encourage your employees to do so in several ways. For starters, you can provide employees with incentives that will help them with tuition and other fees. In return, employees must complete a certain period of time working for the company.
Another great way to encourage employees to take the chance to pursue a higher degree is by providing a better career path for them once they have completed the course. Now that universities like the University of Arizona are offering distance learning programs and online courses, you don’t have to worry about losing workers when they choose to pursue a master’s degree.
One last thing to keep in mind is to let the employees choose their own major. Letting workers pursue a master of public health degree, for instance, will still bring benefits to your business. The extra skills they pick up along the course – including the managerial skills and other practical knowledge – will make taking a public health degree online well worth the time and money.
Provide In-House Training and Sharing Sessions
If you’re a relatively small business and you want employees to grow together, a series of training and sharing sessions are perfect for you. You can schedule courses and invite trainers from various sources to help your employees learn new skills. You can also ask employees to train their colleagues in the skills or knowledge they know well.
An employee who knows how to do social media marketing can teach the rest of the team in a session. The following week, another employee with time management skills can share his or her knowledge to the team as well. Do it in turn and the entire business will bond and grow together.
Give Them Decision-Making Freedom
There are times when the best decisions are the ones that come from the entire team. When these decisions have to be made, take a step back and let your employees do all of the thinking for a change. You can start with less important decisions, such as a decision about the office environment. As you see the team grow, you can then persuade them to take on more responsibilities and handle bigger decisions altogether.
This small exercise, along with the previous tips we talked about earlier, will transform the dynamics of the team and make them feel like the true assets of the company.