The first thing you need to think of when it comes to running your own business is understanding the investments that you will make in every aspect of the company. Not just financial investments, but the personal ones. Investing in your employees is something that can be taken for granted in the world of faceless multi-national corporations. In this factory line mentality of contact centres that has slowly taken over the world, your staff are your business. They are what keeps your company above the parapet, and without them you’ll be nowhere. So it is important to invest in your employees’ education for them to develop focus in themselves, which will help develop your business. There are two ways that you, as their superior, can help nurture them to work more intelligently.
The first stage in encouraging employees to learn more is to actually encourage them to take control of their own development. When it comes to the workplace, nowadays the typically structured learning programme doesn’t fit in with the 24-hour, quick-fix approach that the modern world is now full of. So, by making sure that your employees structure their own development, you are letting them take control of their own destiny and helping them to realize what their own potential is. Embarking on their own choice of learning program, for example, if they wish to be a financial advisor for the company, pointing them towards the best cpa review sites may be enough to get them started on the road to being a financial advisor. While you need to encourage their own educational independence, you need to gently guide them into the right avenue, because ultimately you need them to serve your business, as well as themselves.
Another approach in the workplace that can help is to install e-learning facilities. A lot of organizations are harnessing the power of e-learning. When employees have a spare 30 minutes, instead of wasting time and money, they can jump on an e-learning module, making themselves useful, and helping your business in the process.
Although technology is a very good marker for development in the workplace, it has unfortunately started to phase out an old method which used to work really well, coaching. Going back 20 or 30 years ago, you would have a member of staff take you under their wing and guide you in the right directions, where you would learn a lot in a short space of time. Due to increased pressures on line managers and leaders, there seems to be a little time for this in the modern work arena, but there could be one way to counteract it, by having workshop scenarios such as Saturday Sessions. If they prove to be very popular, this could be something that a line manager can use as a means to impart their wisdom to their employees on a personal level, as opposed to just cascading it through an email! This is something that many employees can find useful because it engages with a different learning style instead of the usual boring method of reading and attempting to memorize information!
Never forget how important your employees are and how you can help them reach their full potential, achieve new career goals and how they can help you achieve business goals.
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