In our previous article, we shared on Positive Work Environment, one of the six components that contribute to providing employees with a positive employee experience that is key to attracting, inspiring and retaining valued employees and talents.
COVID-19 is still a major challenge in many countries around the world. The UK is now battling with a new strain of the virus that causes many countries to bar UK travellers from entering their land. Asia is also witnessing the surge in new infections by the thousands daily. One year on, the virus is still relentlessly spreading across the globe. While the good news is that vaccines are now being made available by major countries and economies, the tunnel that leads to the much needed ‘light’ appears long and narrow.
If you have been following our articles, we all know that positive employee experience contributes to an organisation’s ability to retain their people without whom nothing gets done. Despite organisations having adapted and transformed in this pandemic, how organisations can effectively retain their valued people is nestled on the employee experience they provide.
In this article, we will be sharing with you on how your organisation can still provide positive employee experience through Growth Opportunity in COVID-19 times.
Growth Opportunity: A Key Component In Positive Employee Experience
Embrace Learning Culture: An organisation culture defines what its people do collectively. It’s a way of how it expresses itself with a clear set of value-based behaviours that organisational members exhibit to each other and to external stakeholders. Hence, organisations that embrace a learning culture ensure their people continually learn to stay abreast of the changes in the VUCA environment, keeping themselves relevant.
In our two decades of OD works with clients across the globe, we have seen organisations losing their valued people to “lack of growth opportunity”. How can organisations create growth opportunity for their people? Employees can grow through their Cognitive, Affective and Psychomotive domains.
Learning new knowledge adds to the growth of the cognitive domain, having positive change in attitude shapes the Affective domain and acquiring hands-on skills helps employees to grow their Psychomotive domain.
Depending on the role employees assume, practically everyone within the organisation can grow in one of all of these learning domains.
One of our clients embarked on a “Mentoring” intervention to ensure all their key talents were equipped cross-competencies to help the organisation tackle its greying workforce and avoid losing the organisational knowledge that resided at individual level. At the same time, the client organisation saw the need to keep its younger valued people and talents grow in their jobs. We helped the client to customise a mentoring programme that saw over 20 key senior leaders who attended a Mentoring workshop to be equipped with mentoring skills as they mentored others to perform their respective core functions.
The programme saw an increase in employee motivation, retention and more importantly, retained and revived organisation knowledge. The mentoring programme initiated a learning culture that was cascaded down the hierarchy, seeing team leaders mentoring their members.
Another MNC client sought our help to design a leadership and coaching culture to groom their senior and middle managers to coach their team members. The 3-year programme saw the leaders inspired to excel while further bonding with each other. There was only 1 resignation over the period but he subsequently rejoined the organisation within 3 months from his exit.
During the ‘graduation’ event at the end of the 3 years for both the senior and middle managers, one common heart-felt expressed appreciation for the organisation was “We feel valued by the management and we have grown as a result of the learning we were put through”.
Research has shown that among the top reasons why employees resigned is “no growth opportunity”. COVID-19 may have caused a dent on how people learn in a face-to-face environment but nothing can stop an organisation that embraces a learning culture to keep learning despite the physical restrictions.
Over the last 12 months, the world has witnessed the meteoric rise in the usage of ZOOM for both professional and personal use. According to CEO Eric Yuan, ZOOM’s corporate customers are shifting their focus to longer-term changes in how people communicate, learn anywhere and connect anywhere.
We have also experienced a rise in demand for virtual learning through the ZOOM platform. It’s great to see that organisations that value their people have not stopped learning as an organisation. In doing doing so, they created for their people the needed growth opportunities that are so key to creating positive employee experience. How is your organisation doing in terms of creating growth opportunities for its people?
In summary, growth opportunities are among the 6 key components that drive a positive employee experience, a precursor to employee retention.
In our next article, we will be featuring Meaningful Work to sustain positive employee experience in COVID-19 Pandemic.
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