(Re)Introducing Develop: Grow your people and your business

Heading into the new year, successful organizations are focused on building high-performing, motivated teams. They’re doubling-down on creating businesses that can thrive in this ever-changing world of work. But that’s easier said than done.

According to a recent Gartner study, over a quarter of CEOs rank a persistent skills shortage as the most damaging factor to their company. There’s also pressure to improve productivity, efficiency, and margins. Employees are looking for more support, too. The same study found only one in four employees is confident about their career at their organization. So how do you create a culture that supports both business and individual growth?

The answer is simple: Develop your people. Culture Amp’s team of people scientists crunched the numbers and found that employees using personalized development plans see a 30% average performance rating increase. They also found that development is the number one reason an employee stays or leaves a company, as well as the second-most influential driver of engagement. Further, if managers don’t show an interest in their direct reports’ career aspirations, commitment and motivation decrease by about 20%.

“Getting development right is the biggest lever you have to retain your people and to drive engagement,” explains Didier Elzinga, CEO of Culture Amp. If you want to improve your people’s performance, you have to give them an environment where they feel engaged and motivated at every step of their career journey.

Investing in your employee’s professional growth is also key to future-proofing your organization. According to the World Economic Forum, 50% of all employees around the world need to upskill or reskill by 2025. By enabling your employees to develop critical skills for the future, you can ensure that both your people and your business are equipped to navigate future disruptions.

To succeed in today’s ever-changing world of work, designing a better employee development experience is non-negotiable. That’s why we created Develop, the employee development solution that benefits your people and your business.

Introducing Develop

After speaking with HR leaders around the world, it’s clear that the old ways of employee development aren’t working. Manual individual development plans (IDPs), relying on unsupported managers, static learning libraries, and haphazard career paths are bogging processes down, lowering engagement, and damaging motivation and performance. By and large, traditional approaches to employee development present three major issues:

1. Employees can’t see motivating development opportunities at their organization.
2. Managers struggle to have meaningful growth conversations with their direct reports.
3. HR teams don't have enough visibility into development activities, making it difficult for them to help either managers or employees, or demonstrate L&D effectiveness to leadership.

With Develop, you’ll have the right tools to make these three problems a thing of the past. You can shift from conventional, prescriptive development approaches to a more human conversation that explores your employees’ personal motivators. You’ll understand how their needs and the company's needs can align, resulting in employee development that works for your people and your business.

How to use Develop: 4 key use cases

Backed by rigorous people science, Develop makes it easy for you to unlock measurable, scalable, and easy professional development. Here are four key ways to use Develop to turn your people into top performers.

1. Paint a motivating future for your employees

Ensure that lack of growth doesn’t drive your productivity down and your talent away. With Develop, you can motivate and upskill your people with scalable career paths, personalized development plans, and easy goal setting for continuous growth and performance.

Using Develop’s simple, centralized competency frameworks and career paths, you can provide employees with clear requirements for success at your organization. This helps employees perform better in their current role and get excited about the future. Plus, by promoting the competencies that matter most to your company, you can align development and business strategy. Start with default core competencies designed by our People Scientists or add in your own company- and/or role-specific competencies.

You’ll be able to integrate these competencies right into the development planning workflow. Whether for upward progression or a lateral move, employees can easily see what competencies are needed for top performance. This knowledge – coupled with performance feedback and shoutouts from peers – allows everyone to create an inspiring, strategic development plan.

Develop’s intuitive, science-backed workflows streamline adoption – making it a tool your people will actually want to use. Employee and managers can easily identify their “3 E’s of Development” to pinpoint development opportunities:

• Experience: The on-the-job experiences that help them grow (e.g., stretch tasks, special products, mentoring others, etc.)
• Exposure: Learning through observation (e.g., working with a coach, seeking feedback, shadowing, networking, etc.)
• Education: Structured learning (e.g., courses, books, conferences)

You can link learning resources to each competency to improve proficiency. Options include Culture Amp’s Skills Coach, Playbooks, and Go1 courses, as well as your own Learning Management System (LMS) or coaching platform. Having all three “E’s” provides a holistic path to growth, resulting in well-rounded, successful development.

Employees can set and update development goals right in the platform, and managers can celebrate their progress in performance reviews. By making growth clear, actionable, and rewarding, you can help employees and their managers paint a clear future for growth at your company.

2. Empower managers to support employee development

Managers are expected to support their direct reports’ growth, but they often lack adequate time or guidance to do so effectively.

With Develop, you can support managers with an easy, centralized approach to more meaningful and frequent growth discussions. They will have the guidance and tools they need to better understand what motivates their direct reports and effectively identify key development opportunities.

Competencies and career paths are key for this. Managers can use them to help employees understand what they need to succeed and target development plans that support individual and business growth. In addition, managers can provide more precise and actionable feedback as the employee progresses through their development plan. You can add learning resources to each competency to further reduce the burden on managers.

Moreover, managers and employees can easily access the development plan, which means it’s simple to revisit and adapt together as times and priorities change. New managers can review plans quickly to keep goals on track – they’re no longer lost in a sea of online documents.

By upskilling your managers on the skills they need to help their direct reports and ensuring a consistent development planning experience, you enable both parties to meaningfully grow.

3. Inform L&D strategy and demonstrate impact

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Develop makes it possible to track development initiatives and show positive impact – all in one powerful central dashboard.

Using Develop, you will be able to access a consolidated view of:

• Development activity: Track plan creation, completions, updates, and more. Admins can drill down into development plans and take action to support managers and employees.
• Development effectiveness: Measure the impact of development planning on your employees’ attitudes and behavior.
• Development insights: Identify the most pressing development needs across your business. You will be able to easily analyze strengths and gaps in company- and role-specific competencies to direct your L&D programs and talent processes.

Armed with these insights, gain leadership buy-in, determine the most valuable initiatives to invest in, and ultimately take a more strategic and thoughtful approach to employee development.

Irene Magriplis, the People and Culture Manager at Teach Starter, an education services company, agrees: “[With Develop reporting], if we see a high portion of our team wanting to improve their strategic planning skills, for example, then that gives us the information that we may be able to organize some learning targeted in that space.”

4. Supercharge the entire employee experience

An investment in employee development is an investment into the entire employee experience.

When an employee has the right development opportunities, they are more likely to be motivated, committed, and proud to work at their organization – all of which are key drivers of engagement. As a matter of fact, our team of people scientists found that companies that focus on providing growth opportunities have employees that are 14.6% points more engaged.

By approaching employee development thoughtfully, you also improve the performance management process. Employees can use performance feedback to uncover key growth areas for their development plan. And in turn, employees can set development goals that help them reach their performance goals.

Managers can use Develop’s trackable development goals, career paths, and competencies to fuel richer performance conversations that enable them to better understand employees’ motivations, celebrate learning and growth, and make more informed talent decisions. Further, Develop allows managers to easily separate performance and development conversations, which is proven to boost the quality of both and increase employee motivation.

Unlock measurable, scalable, and easy employee development

Develop by Culture Amp makes tapping into the above benefits simple. Plus, when you use Develop, you can rest assured that you’re benefiting from the research and expertise of our in-house People Science team. What are you waiting for? Start mapping a holistic and well-rounded path to individual and business growth today.

Develop your people into top performers

Learn more about how Develop can help you improve performance and accelerate business growth.

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