Identified in-house talent? Great. Now turn them into leaders and retain them

 

Most businesses will have their standard set of training courses to send attendees on; whether skill or business focussed. Traditionally these can be workshops run in-house by your training department or even some out-sourced courses.  Some firms will even offer the employees an option to choose the training courses they feel would assist them most; perhaps including generic online courses.  Whilst all of these are valid options, I do believe, if you stick to generic training, your business may inadvertently be missing out here.

The above all lack key elements which will give your business a big boost.  By innovating your training, you will increase knowledge retention and improve employee engagement – automatically.  How? Here are a few examples:

  1. Let your employees play a game; make it fun and challenging at the same time; people learn better if they are having fun
  2. Use a simulation that speaks your specific business language and imagery – not just the look and feel, but incorporating applications to retain key terminology and understand your culture and business
  3. Play teams against each other to promote teamwork and spark competition – thus promoting collaboration
  4. Set up a simulation to match your internal business processes – help them to work better in the future 

Reports show that focused engaged employees have a direct impact on business growth.  Targeted leadership development of your identified talented employees will clearly give your firm that competitive advantage we all seek.  Stimulating and challenging games drive employee engagement for retention. All this strengthens the need to get your training planning right.

Next comes the execution.  What works best for your firm? Small workshops, larger seminars, online training programmes for those who need to develop in smaller chunks? A combination of these options? All this points to flexibility and scalability.  Let’s look at a flight simulator – we’ve all heard of them.  They offer the best of all worlds – as they can be included within any flight course, delivered anywhere and in any form. Business simulations do the same thing. Both ensure that learning is applied in a realist environment and helping to build capability fast.

Then the final question:  how do you know it worked?  The answer is simple – look at the stats.  Business simulation games give you insights into how your talented individuals performed – or are performing as the simulation is running.  Innovative technology gives you the details to know what your talent understands, the choices they made and why, the mistakes they made and how they learned from them in executing the next task. 

This is vital as it gives you a list of the capability of the top talent in your business.

These are just some ideas around talent development and corresponding training and development programmes. 

To find out more have a look at this short video or download this white paper, then call us on 0845 371 3088 to discuss how this can work in your business.