Reskilling and redeveloping employees have been the demand of modern workplaces way before the pandemic. But now, with the remote work culture and economic slowdown, the need for reskilling employees has become prominent.
As per a recent survey, 59% of global leaders have stated that reskilling employees is extremely important in the post-pandemic world. Thus, it is essential for businesses to invest in enhancing their employees’ skills to meet future workplace requirements.
Here, many companies might advocate firing their old employees and hiring new ones using psychometric tests as the best way to reskill employees. But we will never recommend this practice to you. That’s because—
- Firstly, to thrive in the post-pandemic world, you need your employees’ trust and loyalty. And by firing people, you will lose trust along with your brand credibility.
- Secondly, hiring and training new employees are both time and money-consuming operations.
Thus, the best solution here is to upscale your current employees. This way, you don’t have to waste your time on hiring new staff and deal with a negative culture in your organization as a result of firing the old people.
However, to reskill your staff, you have to follow a proper protocol. Otherwise, you won’t be able to gain full benefit from reskilling your employees.
Here’s how you should re-skill and redevelop your employees:
Assess your Company Policy
Before you motivate your employees to expand their skills, you need to thoroughly check your company policy. If your post-COVID-19 company policy doesn’t allow or motivate employees to upscale their skills, you should revise your policy.
You need to provide sufficient time and resources to your employees to upscale their skills. For instance, you can allow some time off to your employees so they can join an online class to boost their skills. Also, the company should reimburse all the charges incurred on the skill development.
Examine your Employee's Personality
Once you have revised your company’s policy, you have to analyze each employee’s personality. This will help you understand which skills will best suit your employee.
Every employee has different knowledge and learning power in the organization. You have to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your individual team member and accordingly upgrade their skills.
For example, if your one sales rep is good with technical things, you can motivate him or her to learn coding or programming language to help your organization with the technical work. On the contrary, if your HR head is good with communication, you can ask them to learn new languages so you can grow your business globally.
To examine your employees’ skills, you can use skill assessment software so you can help your team nurture the right skills.
Motivate your Employees to Reskill
Today, you can’t make it mandatory for your employees to reskill. That’s because they are already vulnerable due to the pandemic uncertainties, so extra learning pressure will unnecessarily increase your employees’ stress level.
Instead, you should create circumstances where your employees will automatically make efforts to learn new skills, such as:
Job enrichment: This is a process where you have to increase the dimensions of the exciting job. You can increase skill variety, create more autonomy or put more responsibilities on your employees’ plates. Expanding an employee’s job scale will motivate them to reskill to do their job in the right manner.
Peer consultation: You can organize a peer program in your organization where your employees can meet other professionals working in the industry. Since your employees have been working remotely for more than a year now; thus, interaction with other professionals will help them understand the importance of upscaling in this economy.
Give a challenge: Do you know a bird pushes its kids out of the nest to teach them how to fly. Similarly, you can give a new challenge to your employees, and they will automatically learn new skills to win the challenge.
Just Be Consistent
Reskilling is a constant task. It isn’t only the pandemic thing. You have to create a culture in the organization where your employees have to constantly learn new things and grow their skills.
The pandemic has shown us the importance of many things; reskilling and redeveloping is one of them. Thus, always encourage your employees to learn new things and keep on growing your business.
Author Bio:
Ankur is the co-founder and CEO of GreenThumbs. He is an HRTech enthusiast and a passionate entrepreneur. By education, Ankur is a Chartered Accountant. In addition to running his company, he is an avid reader and knowledge sponge.
