Four ways to use employee development to improve work performance
Consistent employee development can make performance improvement plans obsolete
Employee development provides the best and fastest path to improve any employee’s work performance. Plus it’s a smart way to maintain employee engagement and retention.
A consistent employee development strategy insures you’ll never need to put an employee on a performance improvement plan.
A PIP can be stressful to the employee. Especially if their poor job performance is due to factors they cannot control, such as other employees, managers or departments. It can ruin your relationship with employee for good.
Luckily, a straightforward employee training and development strategy can help you to head off work performance issues.
I will show you how to implement an effective employee development program at low cost. Included are an individual development plan example and an employee performance review template.
(You can find out more about how to build the ultimate employee development plan with examples here.
Here are the four employee training and development strategies that will improve your employees work performance quickly
Poor work performance can result from many reasons, but is typically a sign of inadequate employee training and development.
No worries, you can change that fast using these four employee development strategies:
- Job skills proficiency development is always the best place to start
- Soft skills training is essential, because it supports all jobs skills, builds leadership skill and emotional intelligence
- Employee rewards – incentives for employees can be cost effective yet motivating
- Employee handbook – provides workplace operations guidelines for safety, compliance and HR issues.
Employee training and employee development are separate functions, yet do have much overlap. This Venn diagram helps you to visualize the differences.
Note: Job specific technical training and professional development is not included here.
Employee training vs. employee development:
Hard skills vs. soft skills
The following Venn diagram clarifies the difference between employee training and employee development. The gist of the difference is how they center around hard skills vs soft skills.
- Employee training is typically best directed to hard skills, functional skills, operations and technical skills.
- Employee development is more about intangibles, such as soft skills, communication skills, leadership and emotional intelligence.
It is said that up to 70% of the average job’s skills are actually soft skills.
In addition 92% of companies in a Deloitte survey say soft skills are even more important than hard skills.
And with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, softs skills become ever more important.
This is why soft skills training as part of employee development should not be overlooked. It’s a powerful way to improve work performance.
Now that you know the difference between training and development, let’s look at each of the four employee development strategies.
We’ll start with employee job skills proficiency. But first let me introduce myself and a bit about my background in employee development.
About the Author
My name is Larry LaFata. I’m a talent development coach and the founder of WorkerMotivation.com.
I took my 30 years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies and now build step-by-step templates and self-assessments that streamline talent development.
I have a unique ability to synthesize research and innovation into organized, usable training concepts. This practical approach ensures that my programs and courses are concise and effective. The result is self-assessment and skills development templates designed to truly customize your results.
No psychology tests or theories are used here. The focus is only on skills development.
My goal is to provide you with streamlined solutions for leadership training, employee development and emotional intelligence. Designed in such a way that you can implement them quickly.
Job skills: the first priority of employee development
Your first priority to improve job performance is job skills development.
Developing great job skills is simply a matter of taking the employee job description and job requirements and breaking them down into job skills proficiencies.
The way you can do this is shown here and in my employee development plan template kit.
This chart shows a sales representative job description converted to an example individual development plan.
This self performance review example shows how each skill allows for employee self evaluation.
Employee self evaluation template for job skills
The employee self-evaluation allows the employee to rate and rank each job proficiency on their own. I provide employee self-evaluation examples below.
The concept of self-appraisal by employee is gaining ground for several reasons:
- Primarily because it engages the employee to collaborate with manager, rather than be a passive recipient of a performance review to which they have no say
- As you see in these employee self-performance review examples, employee is able to rank each of their skill proficiencies and rate their priority. This provides employer with tremendous insight as to where employee thinks they stand with job skills.
- As the employer ranks and rates employee skills to develop, they have specific skills development goals to focus on rather than behavioral categories, which are vague and abstract.
- Going through each job skill during the self-appraisal process, allows employee to see the entire scope of what skills their job role entails.
The innovation of this self assessment example is that it is also used as the employee performance review template.
This saves both you and the employee time during the performance review.
Employee self evaluation examples:
In these individual development plan examples, I use a self evaluation template for a sales representative.
Job role proficiencies are the first priority to be developed:
- You are converting duties and responsibilities into individual skills
- The two categories of skills in this example are appointment setting proficiencies and software demo presentation proficiencies.
- Employee self-rating column: This is the self appraisal by employee, where they rank and rate themselves for each skill proficiency
- It also acts as an employee review template. So manager can rank and review the employee from the same template each quarter
- The design of these employee evaluation templates allow you to put employee’s job performance evaluation on quarterly auto pilot, reducing surprises or shocks
Employee self evaluation template for soft skills training
Your second employee development priority is soft skills training.
You’ll use the same template as we used for job skills.
The importance of soft skills cannot be overstated. They are your ‘secret weapon’ to build and support great job skills in an underperforming employee.
Soft skills are a powerful way to develop:
- Communication skills
- Emotional intelligence habits
- Leadership soft skills
- Interpersonal skills
- Soft skills for customer service
- Business soft skills
- Soft technical proficiency skills
- Personal leadership development
- Professional growth
- Employee career development
in addition, you can fine tune soft skills to improve your entire workforce:
- Develop a distinct workplace culture
- Maintain skills standards throughout your workforce
- Help employees work through behavioral issues in their own way
- Use for coaching employees with a negative attitude
- Turnaround an unmotivated workforce
I supply a list of hard and soft skills in my Employee Development Plan Template Kit.
How soft skill training develops emotional intelligence and leadership
This Venn diagram show how soft skills and emotional intelligence are connected.
- Soft skills develop emotion self management skills.
- Emotional intelligence develop emotion management in both self and others. So over time you grow to relate as a leader to others.
The more soft skills you develop in your employees, the stronger emotional intelligence habits and leadership skills you develop in them as well.
Depending on their job role, an employee can even develop advanced leadership skills, management and taking charge using softs kills.
Employee self evaluation template for soft skills - example
In this soft skills template example, we are developing communications and leadership soft skills.
This soft skills training provides powerful benefits:
- Developing a distinct workplace culture: You are providing each employee with the same universe of soft skills to choose from – this allows you to fine tune the skills, values and proficiencies you want your distinct workforce to develop
- Maintain skills standards throughout the entire workforce: Soft skills training can lift all employees to the same emotional intelligence and leadership standards.
- Soft skills can help employees work through behavioral issues or negative attitude issues in their own way.
So now you have an excellent, low cost way to develop job skills, job support skills and emotional intelligence all in one template.
Best of all the employee self evaluation combines with employee performance review template, so it’s easier to manage each quarter.
You can imagine how powerful this is for training new employees. Set them on the right path quickly.
The next fast, easy and inexpensive strategy to improve job performance is with a simple employee rewards program.
Employee rewards program
The third way to improve employee work performance is an employee rewards program.
Employee recognition can take many forms.
If you are creative, an employee rewards program can be very inexpensive, yet provide the rewards and recognition that employees crave.
Employee rewards don’t need to be expensive to be motivating and team building:
- Monthly breakfast for best performer
- Cash incentives for employee (within company guidelines)
- Luncheon ritual
- Prize ideas as voted by team
- Roll of the dice multiplier for dollar rewards
- Perks
- Trophy
- Etc.
Awards can be corny, they can be glitzy they can be rituals that everyone enjoys, they can be funny, but most of all……they must be what the employees value!
In addition, reward must be commensurate with the achievement. The top sales performer for the year would want more than a certificate to feel rewarded and recognized.
Here is a truncated example of a customizable rewards template included in my employee development plan template kit.
Employee rewards examples
In this rewards program example:
- You are providing rewards for each specific category of attained skill proficiencies
- Rewards are awarded based on outcome ratings
Example here is blurred to protect copyrighted contents.
Employee technical training and professional development
As shown in the Venn diagram earlier, employee training of hard skills and technical skills overlaps with employee development.
Employee training can include technical training, professional development and company guidelines training in the employee handbook.
Technical training and professional development is job specific training related to job description and job requirements.
It may be part of employee development or it may be a separate function, apprenticeship, formal education training, etc.
Employee training may cover technical training, professional development, software training, device operation training, appliance and equipment training.
If employee’s poor performance is due to underperforming in areas of professional expertise, professional, educational or technical remedial training may be required.
Studies show 54% of employees want to develop job-specific skills so they can be more valuable to their organization, move up and make more money.
Consider both employee development and job-related training courses for this purpose as well.
I won’t cover professional and technical training here since it is job role and company specific.
Luckily, there are many great resources for employee training courses, technical training and professional development on the market to choose from.
Be selective to choose those that are relevant to your industry and your organization.
Employee Handbook – operations guidelines
The fourth way to improve employee work performance through employee development is with the employee handbook. Though it falls under training more than employee development, it is an important tool to guide employee behavior and expectations.
The handbook should provide workplace operations guidelines for safety, compliance and HR issues.
Depending on your insurance and legal risk factors, this can come in the form of an online training program or employee training software.
The employee handbook can include:
- Compliance training
- Employee guidelines for organizational operations
- OSHA workplace safety, environmental health and safety training
- Cybersecurity and data privacy
- Employee security awareness training
- Workplace sexual harassment and sensitivity training
- HIPPA training
- Ethics and insider trading policy
- Leaves of absence, pregnancy leave etc.
- Exit routes and emergency planning
- Intellectual property security
- Gifts, travel and entertainment policy
If you are a small or medium business, you can probably find an off the shelf employee handbook template to get you started.
Summary of the four ways to use employee development to improve work performance
Employee development is hands down the best way to improve work performance quickly. It is your fastest cure for poor job performance.
Using job skills training, soft skills training, an employee handbook and employee rewards, you’ll develop well rounded employees with high productivity and strong people skills.
You can develop management skills and leadership skills as well. In addition, soft skills are proven to support effective technical and hard skills development.
Being proactive about employee development insures you prevent poor job performance. If possible you want to avoid getting to the point of putting employees on performance improvement plans.
For a concise and comprehensive employee development program, try my new Employee Development Plan Template Kit:
Author’s note on AI:
All content on this site is written by a human, not by Artificial Intelligence. I write for people, not machines.
This ensures I retain empathy, understanding and emotional intelligence in how I approach each topic. It also ensures you are not reading generic, mediocre, “most popular” conformist content, but rather a unique point of view truly geared to your needs for employee development.
Boost employee job performance from day one
Build job skills and soft skills quickly with concise templates
Innovative Employee Development Plan Template Kit includes everything an employer needs to improve employee job performance from day one.
- Saves employers time: easy one time set up, fast quarterly reviews and employee completes their own self evaluation templates
- Build job skills, soft skills, leadership and emotional intelligence customized to the level of each employee’s skillset
- Rewards program templates insure employee motivation and retention
- Step-by-step instructions guide and clean employee skills development templates in excel.
Best for up to 30 developable employees.
