Practical ways to invest in employees without breaking your budget.
It’s often been said that the best investment you can make is in yourself.
While investing in index funds, the stock market, company shares or real estate can be lucrative, if done wisely, there’s no better investment than self-investment.
People invest to create value.
Not just short-term value, but value that can transcend over multiple years, decades and even generations.
This is why investing in people is often prized as a lucrative decision.
For example, investing in an employee’s skill development, technical capabilities, and industry knowledge, can earn a lucrative Return on Investment (ROI) for companies.
This return on investment may be exemplified through better customer service, creative problem-solving, efficient workload management as well as finding ways to reduce operating costs while maximising revenue.
Given these valuable dividends, employee investment has become a high priority for modern companies.
How much should I invest in my employees?
Employers are generally aware of the benefits of trained employees.
However, the challenge often lies in deciding upon an appropriate budget for employee investment.
Generally, companies hope to achieve the maximum return with minimum spending. Others may invest heavily into their staff, only to see little ROI.
There are several factors that should be carefully considered when deciding upon your employee investment budget:
- What is the current state of our company’s finances? Less cashflow means resources have to be strategically allocated to avoid wastage.
- How many employees do we have? It’s very possible that, the higher the staff count, the higher the budget.
- What skills and competencies do we want our employees to develop? Valuable skills that are in high-market demand may carry a higher cost.
- What teaching and learning methods are to be employed? Obviously sending employees to executive conferences or workshops will require more funding than using online resources.
- How urgent or necessary is it for us to invest into our employees? If it’s not a priority, funds allocated to employee development would be sparse. Conversely, if the company realises it’s customer service levels, product quality or brand reputation is suffering because of under-trained staff, then increasing the investment budget is likely.
How to invest in employees without exhausting my budget?
No company wants to waste funds on a bad stock investment.
The same applies to employee investment. No employer wants extend their budget, invest in employees, and only experience the same results.
Therefore, some common ways companies can invest in their staff without breaking budget include:
Online Education
The internet has evolved where virtually anything can be taught, learned and implemented.
This wealth of knowledge can be an effective tool employers can leverage to help staff to gain pertinent knowledge and develop relevant skills.
A lot of internet learning sites offer courses that employees can enroll and complete on their own time. This flexibility allows learning to be convenient personalised and enjoyable.
Some of the skills employees can enroll, through their company’s subscription include:
- Skillshare – features a number of creative courses, business and entrepreneurship content.
- Udemy – everything from marketing to data science, business and creative courses
- Hubspot – marketing, sales and customer service resources for staff members
- Coursera – University-level courses with both free and paid options to learn key skills
While there are a host of other sites that offer training, learning and educational content, bear in mind that your company does not have to spend large sums on training.
Your company’s budget can be maintained using online courses, video content, webinars, masterclasses, virtual masterminds, forums and online communities to enhance employees’ knowledge and skills.
Additionally, a lot of modern companies reward staff, financially or otherwise when their training courses have been completed. This motivates staff to stick to their learning and complete their online training.
Mentorships
Mentorships can be a great option for companies on a training budget.
You may already have qualified and accomplished people in your organisation who can act as mentors to younger employees.
Mentorships are highly beneficial to employee success as many people would agree, not everything can be learnt in a classroom.
Employees with an accomplished and experienced mentor can exchange insights about career advancement, performance strategies and self-improvement. They can relate to and attain valuable knowledge to develop their capabilities from someone who has already walked in their shoes.
Likewise, the younger generation workers can offer mature workers fresh perspectives on leadership, strategy, technology and teamwork.
With mentorship programs, a high ROI can be expected as the information exchanged with a seasoned mentor is highly valuable to the working world.
Job enrichment policies
A lot of people learn by doing.
Therefore, job enrichment policies are highly effective in enabling employees to acquire new skills within new environments and from new people.
Some of these policies include:
- Internships – allowing staff members to intern at other departments builds their knowledge, improves their networking skills and collaboration spirit.
- Job rotation – Work can get repetitive, so job rotation is a cost-effective way to allow employees to perform multiple tasks to engage their minds and pick up new things
Through job enrichment policies, employees may also discover another calling or skillset, which they were probably unaware of.
For example, through job enrichment a customer service staff member may discover he or she has a knack for numbers, or a sales assistant may develop tech-savvy skills.
Acquiring or discovering these skills through job enrichment could provide new opportunities where their skills can be harnessed in other parts of the company.
Optimising their physicality
Employee investment isn’t only confined to skills. Just as you would invest in your health, you can also optimise your employees’ physical vitality.
It’s no secret that companies who invest in health and wellbeing programs tend to have a healthier and happier workforce.
Consider an after-work Zumba or aerobic workout session which allows employees to get moving and have fun.
Similarly, group hikes, group outings, team marathons and sports activities cost very little in terms of expenditure.
Employee investment doesn’t have to break a budget.
A company can strategically invest in its employees to create healthy, knowledgeable, highly skilled and guided individuals.
Such companies can expect a substantial ROI in terms of having staff members who provide professional service, a positive work ethic and maximize the company’s revenue potential.
