How to use meaningful leadership and development opportunities to attract and retain top talent

In a highly competitive employment environment, demonstrating a healthy and sustainable approach to learning and development (L&D) opportunities within your company can be what sets you apart as an employer. But with budgets tightening and time-poor teams, how can you ensure your L&D initiatives are prioritised and acted upon, rather than relegated to a bottom drawer?

Let’s explore how a proactive, people-led approach to professional development can be the answer to making the most of your current team, and improving retention among new recruits.

Employee learning is critical for organisational success

Building a culture of learning and a business where people can grow and develop is a good thing for your bottom line, productivity and retention.

Our research has found that if an employee doesn’t believe the company is contributing to their development they are upto 2.5 times more likely to leave.

Insufficient L&D opportunities are also a bigger contributor to employees leaving than other factors such as compensation, work-life balance, or not working well with their manager. We surveyed over 100,000 employees worldwide across a 12-month period and found that the most cited reason for an employee leaving an organisation in their exit survey was a lack of career opportunities.

We also know that career development opportunities are important to candidates when they’re looking for their next role. Research from Gallup found that 59% of millennials say development opportunities are extremely important when they’re deciding to apply for a position.

As Julie Reddish, head of people and culture at Optimal Workshop notes that candidates are good at spotting the companies which are doing L&D well:

“We’re in a candidate-led market for talent, and people are savvy to inauthentic promises on job ads. Not only do you need to be able to demonstrate that you’re putting your money where your mouth is on investing in L&D, you also need to show that you recognise the benefits of professional development. From where we stand, our business is fast-paced, so candidates with a growth mindset and a willingness to keep up are drawn to working in places with a strong and sustainable L&D approach.”

Not only does L&D play a part in the recruitment process, it also has a potential impact on performance and productivity, and enhances efficiency, effectiveness and innovation within any organisation.

So how can you supercharge your L&D approach to make the most of your investment?

People science principles for L&D success

A common issue when implementing L&D programs is offering training and development opportunities without articulating the ‘why’ behind them. Taking a one-size-fits-all approach to training can mean it becomes a tick box exercise dreaded by your people, rather than a juicy perk.

Common points of friction that stop L&D programs from being successful include:

• Not knowing where to start, and not having a clear process to follow

• Losing track of learning and development plans so that they’re only looked at once a year, rather than shared, updated and tracked year-round

• Not having internal people who are advocating for development and helping with accountability

So how to solve these L&D pain points?

Ultimately, we want employees to drive their own development, and to move beyond traditional learning programs, which rarely lead to sustained behavioural change.

Think about it. How often have you taken part in a training activity or workshop and had a fun time, but then gone back to business as usual the very next day with very little change to how you approach your work?

If we’re exposed to training content as a one-off exercise, without specific contextualisation to how we work, then it’s unlikely to have a sustained impact. Estimates of how much training actually translates to change in the workplace can be as low as 10% – 30%.

A new approach to L&D priorities

Because L&D programs traditionally measure success on the satisfaction of the experience (eg, having fun at a training day), rather than the impact of what employees have learnt on their performance or ability, they’ve missed an opportunity to create real impact.

So for success, we need a new, more strategic approach to L&D and the plans we’re creating. To do this, we focus on the three ‘Es’ of L&D:

Education: this is structured learning such as courses, online resources, books and podcasts, and should only make up 10% of your L&D time.

Exposure: this refers to opportunities to learn through job shadowing, professional associations and networking, making up 20% of your L&D time.

Experience: This is where the magic happens, and where we should be focusing the majority of our L&D time — ideally 70% of it. This is about enriching development activities in the day-to-day tasks of your role, stretch projects, internal coaching and encouraging people to apply their learnings to real-life situations.

By making experience the top priority of L&D, we’re not only creating an environment where what we’re learning is relevant to individual roles, but we’re also reducing the need for big external training budgets, and instead focusing on the existing expertise and experience within our organisations.

As Julie from Optimal Workshop says, sharing expertise means better development and stronger teams:

“Our internal mantra is that if you learn something, then share it. We ask our people to present back their learnings internally, so that everyone can benefit. We’ve built a culture of curiosity, where people are constantly sharing, and we also encourage people to embed their learning within the business. For example, putting someone onto a project who isn’t as experienced, but wants to put their learning into practice. We also host internal training days where our internal experts can upskill the company, while also building a great team culture.”

Managers make it happen

In times of uncertainty, L&D doesn’t feel like as much of a priority, but it can be a way of setting your team up to innovate and invent, and keep their learning brains active so that they’re ready for new challenges as they arise.

And while it’s important for employees to drive their own development and feel excited about where they’re heading, we need managers to steer the L&D ship on a personal level.

The research shows us that when managers show a genuine interest in their people, it has an impact on employee motivation, retention and pride in their workplace.

So encouraging and empowering your managers to take on a coaching role with their team members is the key to creating sustainable and impactful L&D programs.

Regular one-to-ones with managers and their people have a huge influence on retention — we know that employers that don’t use one-to-ones have a 54% higher turnover rate than those that do. So support your managers to make time for one-to-ones, to create a shared and collaborative agenda for these meetings, and to check-in on the things that matter, not just tactical updates.

A long-term L&D approach to success

Taking a long-term and sustainable approach to your learning and development sets your company and your people up for success. So keep it simple, empower your people to take charge of their own L&D pathway, and set your managers up for success in helping their people stay on track.

Watch the full webinar here.