Building Employee Capabilities
One of the most important factors driving sustainable organizational performance is capability-building programs among employees. In a business landscape that is led by innovation and beleaguered by attrition, there is a constant demand for talent that can adapt to uncertain times.
In order to build a more resilient workforce, it is absolutely necessary to build a more resilient organization. The focus now needs to be on increasing workforce capacity to handle stress and manage continuous change. Organizations need people who are agile and flexible in their thought processes, and this is more relevant than ever during the global pandemic.
The need of the hour is capability-building programs that are aimed at helping employees develop their knowledge across some very important skill areas. Such programs will help organizations navigate the current state of ambiguity and deliver greater impact. Let’s deep dive into 4 such key skill areas that need to be looked at.
1. Leadership And Management Skills
Even though organizations globally know the significance of leadership development and effective management, many do not have strong leadership development training programs in place. Given the need for more tangible business outcomes in today’s uncertain times, leadership is an in-demand skill.
It is imperative to create a continuous understanding of how leaders need to meet the strategic demands of business, why it’s necessary to “walk the talk” of company culture, how they can manage teams, how they can encourage essential mindset shifts, and how they can create accountability and continuous improvement. Companies need to offer good leadership and management solutions that provide learning related to the different aspects of the development journey of modern learners and leaders.
2. Digital Skills
At a time when digitalization is the norm across industries and verticals, organizations have already realized the vitality of providing tech skills training for employees. Digital skills are no longer a "good to have," they are a prerequisite and it has become increasingly important to have a workforce that is cross-disciplined, with a higher percentage of digital literacy.
It’s essential to focus on digital skills training to bridge the gap, by investing in training solutions that constantly reskill the workforce in the latest technologies and keep pace with the market. Companies need to ensure that they deploy the technical and functional training designed to build the skills that are required to accomplish the jobs of today, as well as the necessary skills needed to drive efficiency and growth for the future.
3. Business Skills
Organizations that wish to be high-performing businesses know the value of developing the skills of their workforce so that they can compete at the highest level. To this end, it’s necessary to ensure that efforts are undertaken for the employees to learn about the strategic priorities and corresponding initiatives that the company is driving. This includes daily business tasks, plus efficiency or transformation efforts and new growth initiatives.
One way to achieve this is by empowering the employees with effective business skills via robust training programs. Business skills are a combination of critical hard and soft skills. Through such programs, organizations can enable employees to align themselves towards short- and long-term business goals at the same time, delivering consistent performance to achieve and sustain profitability.
4. Interpersonal Skills
Businesses can achieve major advances in several areas of the workplace by offering soft skills training such as collaboration, teamwork, critical thinking, decision making, and communication to their employees in business-critical areas. Unfortunately, the importance of soft skills is undermined in comparison to technical skills or hard skills. This is because organizations often expect people to inherently know these skills.
However, these are the very skills that need to be focused on, as much as if not more than technical skills, because developing them will certainly help grow business. Organizations need to empower individual employees to achieve their performance goals. They can do it by offering them a mix of carefully curated training that ensures they are trained on core soft skills.
Parting Thoughts
In today’s fast-paced corporate environment, it’s no longer enough to focus only on developing job-related hard skills. Capability development across the areas mentioned above is a necessity, and by doing so organizations can drive impact at different levels, leading to business productivity.
