When employers encourage employees to better themselves professionally (and personally), the whole organisation improves as a result. A team of employees who are constantly improving is one that's less likely to stagnate because with new skills come new perspectives, and the opportunity to tackle challenges and problems with fresh ideas and a newfound clarity of thought.
With that in mind, we've compiled a list of 6 common areas of improvement that business leaders should look to invest in, including both soft skills and technical professional development skills, to help ensure you get the most from your teams.
In doing so, you can expect your organisation to see greater productivity, quality and contentedness among its ranks.
1. Committing to problem-solving through curiosity
One of the best things you can do as an employer is foster a culture of curiosity because a curious workforce is a more effective workforce. Why? Because curiosity within the workplace encourages employees not to be afraid to try new things - to approach challenges with bold and innovative solutions simply to see if they’ll work.
If you settle, you stagnate
If employees are content to do things as they've always been done, you might not suffer as an organisation, but the likelihood that you'll progress is small. Whereas with an open-minded culture, one in which workers aren't just allowed to be curious and try different things, but are actively encouraged to do so, a business's horizons expand massively.
Implementing curiosity
A culture of curiosity can't be introduced overnight, however, there are certain things that business leaders can do to make a start. One of the simplest of these is to support questioning - to encourage the whys.
Giving your teams a weekly opportunity (or even just monthly to begin with) to sit down and review processes and approaches, and interrogate the reasoning behind them or determine their efficacy is a great way to start giving confidence and agency back to employees.
Creating confidence
By doing this, employees will feel more likely to be able to suggest even bolder, more radical changes in the future. Of course, not everything will stick when it comes to the quality of ideas suggested, but a mixture of great ideas and passable ones is still better than no ideas whatsoever.
The truly successful businesses are those that look towards disruption, rather than settling with stagnation.
2. Prioritising time management skills
Time management is undoubtedly one of the most important areas that employees can improve upon. If you were to take a look at your employees as things stand, does it seem to you like they have a good grasp on time management, or do they tackle tasks as and when they come up?
Employees who better manage their time are typically less prone to become stressed or anxious, tend to deliver higher-quality work, and are more likely to meet deadlines and targets that have been set in a timely manner.
Your time starts now
There are several practices you can introduce immediately to improve time management within your workforce, including the use of time-tracking apps and the development and implementation of clearer, more explicitly-defined schedules.
These might seem obvious processes, but it's amazing how few organisations actually make use of them. And even for those that do, they rarely become a habit and instead get forgotten about a few weeks or months after first being adopted.
Invest in the basics
Another simple, easy-to-implement time management solution to consider introducing is the Pomodoro Technique. Based on the tomato kitchen timer used by the method's inventor, this technique focuses on working solidly for 25 minutes, before having a dedicated 5 minute break.
A 25-minute stint of work can appear more manageable and easy to motivate yourself through when compared with a 3-hour block, say. It helps address procrastination, therefore, and motivates workers to crack on with their workload knowing that there's not too long before they get their first little break.
To encourage the method's uptake by employees, you could even invest in some little physical timers for each employee; a low-cost investment for potentially high productivity gains.
3. Improving conflict resolution
As much as we're sure business leaders would like it to be the case, the workplace isn't always all sunshine and rainbows, and conflicts, whether between employees or between employees and employers, do unfortunately arise.
Workplaces are places of tension
There's always an inherent underlying vein of tension that runs throughout a workplace, no matter how well run it is. That's because organisations have all kinds of pressures placed on their employees all the time; whether that be overarching 10-year strategies, imminent deadlines, KPIs or any other number of things. That’s without accounting for everyone’s individual personal lives.
You'll never eliminate tension or conflict - so learn to manage it
It's important, therefore, that both employers and employees are taught how to better manage conflicts as and when they crop up. Whether you have team members with naturally strong interpersonal skills or employees who perhaps struggle more with social interactions in the workplace, everybody can benefit from undergoing some conflict management training.
Simple tips to get started
- Active listening
Employees can look to improve their listening skills with active listening, which is where you truly give full attention to the speaker and indicate you're not just hearing what they're saying, but actually taking it in, rather than simply waiting for your opportunity to speak.
- Remove emotion from heated moments
Another tip is to remind employees to remove emotion from the situation. What commonly happens when a disagreement occurs between employees is for the emotion of what's happened to start dictating the subsequent conversation, which in turn can lead to one side (and often both) lashing out, or alternatively, disengaging from the matter entirely and walking away, which itself can cause problems.
By finding ways to overcome that initial kneejerk emotional reaction, and sitting with it long enough so that you can address the situation more calmly, disagreeing employees are more likely to be able to successfully navigate their dispute, or at least not escalate it further.
- Encourage compromise
The art of compromising is important within an organisation because it helps ensure that disputing team members both leave the situation feeling like they're valued in that their needs have been seen and met, at least partially.
4. Developing leadership skills
Whether an employee is in a defined leadership role or not, the ability to step up and lead when called upon is helpful for any organisation. Clearly, though, those that benefit most from these skills are team leaders, executives, managers and any other workplace professional who are responsible for other employees on a day-to-day basis.
The benefits of strong leadership
The benefits of strong leadership skills include a more motivated workforce, clearer responsibilities and less room for confusion (or finger-pointing should something go wrong), and increased efficiency and employee performance within teams, to name just three.
5. Enhancing organisational skills
What's the overall feeling surrounding your organisation's current work processes - is it one of calm and control? Or one of frenetic chaos? If it's the latter, where things are often forgotten about, completed at the last minute, or done in a generally unstandardised manner, then your employees' organisational skills might be lacking.
Make both smaller and larger changes alike
Implement the use of project management systems like Trello to give your employees an easier way to keep track of and document everything, and incentivise more organised working at every level, even down to employees keeping their desk areas neat and tidy. Organised working leads to even more organised working, with small changes leading to overall shifts in culture.
6. Targeting written communication skills
With so much work conducted over email these days, strong written communication skills are essential for organisations to succeed and forge prosperous relationships with other companies and customers. Take the time to review your workforce's current writing skills. Are they up to scratch? Or could they be improved?
You don't need to be a Nobel laureate
Not everybody is a born writer, of course, but there are easy fixes you can implement to improve the spelling, grammar and punctuation of your employees' work, so that the overall written quality of documents sent out to clients, customers and other professionals within the organisation is improved. These include spellcheck software like Grammarly, for example.
Final thoughts
The areas of improvement listed above are just some of the ways that business leaders and HR departments can look to address within the workplace. If you're looking to improve your workplace L&D Plus UTS offers a comprehensive suite of Enterprise Learning programs to help your organisation flourish.
