Why Fostering Personal Growth Matters - EmployeeConnect HRIS
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Why Fostering Personal Growth Matters

Why Fostering Personal Growth Matters

“When learning is purposeful, creativity blossoms. When creativity blossoms, thinking emanates. When thinking emanates, knowledge is fully lit. When knowledge is lit, economy flourishes.” ― A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (India’s 11th President)

It’s true. Giving someone the opportunity of personal development is the seed to any type of growth. As an employer, you believe it to be the offer given to the interviewed candidate for the advertised position. This is only because you’re confident with the return on this particular investment – believing it to be consistent performance delivery. Little do many know this belief falls short down the track as employees feel demotivated and subsequently start underperforming. As a typical response from an employer, you re-analyse their worth on keeping them on board when really the analysis should happen on your end of the spectrum. What most employers fail to realise is asking themselves whether it’s a problem on their end, and majority of the time it’s a stubborn no when really the answer is yes.

What we need to come to grips with is how we can prevent underperformance and perpetuate productivity. Doing just this will not only see how to fix the problem but dismiss the idea of re-analysing an employee’s worth in the organisation. Using this process, we avoid unnecessary turnover rates and can sustain an existing talent pool.

It’s clearly evident that your employees are the central focus. We’ve already checked the box against attracting and recruiting talent, but now we’re left with a box on sustaining that talent. How we can do that is by understanding how to engage employees. One way we can do that is by fostering for personal growth. The need for employee engagement is pivotal as it’s profoundly understood to directly impact performance. It will impact absenteeism potentially becoming higher turnover rates, productivity and consequently profitability. Drawing back on the short example earlier of your belief falling short from hiring a new candidate, you’ll see that it was their performance being affected. In saying so, let’s look towards personal growth as a tool for engaging employees.

Personal growth in a nutshell, is advancing your skills and expertise along with developing your qualities. It’s an important and given aspect in the workplace environment. To add, it’s one of the main reasons why individuals seek to work for organisations – aka. the desire for career development. Why we should seek to foster for our employees’ personal growth are the following reasons being:

  1. They add value to your company – Daily growth will see your employees flourish in their field. When they flourish, you’ll notice the knowledge and wisdom they possess become more diverse. Your employees can then apply this new knowledge with their tasks producing state of the art pieces of work. Quality work produced before deadlines? Doesn’t that seem beneficial for both you and your company as well as for your employees? (It’s something to consider…)
  2. They become more interesting – As part of what makes an employee stand out, as well as being an underlying reason to their commitment to work is their interaction with others. When you provide mechanisms to grow personally, your employees will be able to hold and maintain conversations over interesting topics. (The jaw dropping new episode of Game of Thrones anyone?) With your employee exhibiting this quality about them, you see that they have the ability to grasp onto the attention of others. It’s a social psychological aspect that employees need to perform.
  3. They remain sharp beside learning curves – To keep up with society’s inevitable changes to technology and processes, it’ll involve fostering for personal growth by building knowledge and skills. You’ll see the effectiveness that your employee has in overcoming challenges your company faces. By doing so, they’re able to help you see they’re worthy of securing their position in the company.

 

While each of these factors are beneficial in different forms, the real question left to answer is how do we foster for this personal growth? There are many ways in which a quality leader can utilise to reap these benefits:

  • Pay attention to your employees’ interests and help expand them – Know what they want and how you can help them achieve it.
  • Implement monthly team training sessions – It could be going through new cases together and sharing new skills and knowledge.
  • Understand that your employees are not “machines” but “a community of individuals eager to learn” – Hear them out and understand them on a personal level. Treat them as mentees rather than slaves.
  • Prepare employees to attend seminars with professional development speakers – Evoking inspiration every now and then will remind your employees what it’s all worth.
  • Organise one-on-one health counsellors with your employees to help achieve growth related to health – Showing that you care about your employees’ wellbeing will see their need to do so.
  • Encourage to grow by providing incentives – Spark growth with a bit of motivation.

 

In order for your company to grow and advance, it starts with gripping onto the ability to help others grow. By others, I mean the individuals who help bring your organisation forward – aka. your employees. Any great leader will realise that by consistently keeping this understanding in the forefront of their mind after onboarding new recruits, will see a better management of talent retention. In return, you’ll sustain performance levels to meet targets and goals through productivity. This is one of the reasons why we initiate in new recruitment, right?

Alexi Gavrielatos
alexi@employeeconnect.com

Business Development at EmployeeConnect