Learning and development is an essential part of any organization, for which the term Organizational Development is also used in a broader sense. Small businesses often ignore this aspect of building a team. This is usually because of not knowing the importance of learning and skill development for the organization and its teams.

Some Reasons to Have Learning and Development Initiatives

• To develop industry related skills for better products or services.
• For better relations within teams.
• For better management of teams.
• For better quality control of products or services.
• To improve sales and marketing effectiveness.
• For higher employee retention.

How does Learning and Development help in employee retention?

Any thinking employee will constantly plan for their future. An essential part of this plan is to have the skills for future employment. If your employees do not think that way, then you are in trouble anyway. It may be that you don’t want your employees to think as their work doesn’t require thinking. Factory workers are considered to be in non-thinking jobs. They are just a part of the machines, just easier to program, maintain, and replace. However, other jobs require people to think, for doing better, to plan ahead, to solve problems, and so on. If lack of learning opportunities is not letting their thinking ability grow, then the organization and the employees will both stagnate.

Stagnation is decline.

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If you start feeling the stagnation or decline, the first thought is that we aren’t hiring the right people. Isn’t that a sign that you wish the existing employees had better skill and should be replaced? That though comes from a natural tendency to push the blame on others.

“They are not upgrading themselves.”

“They are not suited for our growing organization.”

An advantage that large organizations give to their employees is the opportunities to learn. If you think from the perspective of employment, better skilled people prefer to join these larger organizations even if they pay lower.

What if we provide training and they leave?

Ah, the very question you would expect. There is a well-known quote on this. Even some comics and cartoons.

Looking at training and other ways of learning in an organization as a cost can, in fact, cost the organization dearly.

Untrained employees do the same work in more time. They make more mistakes. They don’t create new products to compete in the market with. They may not have good relations with each other.

But training is expensive, isn’t it?

Yes, and no. If you noticed, there’s a mention of ‘other ways of learning’ next to the cartoon above. Training is just one way to learn. Learning within the organization can be in very cost-effective ways, many of them are informal but effective. Learning interventions can be designed based on your budget. However, many of these cost-effective interventions require effort from the management to be successful. Formal training too can be more effective by such interventions.

Knowledge Sharing is one of the methods, in which employees are encouraged and incentivized to share their knowledge. The knowledge can be from experience or may be collected from external sources. It can be a combination of training and knowledge-sharing, where on employee gets trained and shares the learnings with the rest. The management needs to ensure that the hurdles in knowledge sharing are removed. Many feel they will lose their importance if they share their knowledge. Such fears need to be addressed by giving incentives, encouragement, and opportunities of exchanging knowledge between many and not by one to many.

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