Uptraining your employees is crucial if you want to support your team’s career goals and get more from your people. Investing in your employee’s development shows that you care about their progression, too. This can meaningfully boost morale and aid your efforts to create a positive work environment.
However, you may find that folks become competitive when given uptraining opportunities. Left unchecked, this can easily create a toxic environment wherein some employees feel left behind and others subtly sabotage their coworker’s opportunities for growth.
As a leader, you can create a supportive environment while pushing employees to reach their potential by building strong team relationships during training events. This shows staff that your training budget is big enough to support everyone and that collaboration is the fastest route towards success at your firm.
The Value of Uptraining
Uptraining your team is essential for your long-term success. Without a clear training program in place, folks’ skills will become obsolete and your business will lose its competitive edge. Conversely, investing in your team with regular uptraining programs will ensure that your team remains up to date with the latest breakthroughs in your industry.
You may find that you have a low uptake in uptraining programs when you first offer them to employees. This is a common experience, as many employees just want to focus on their core responsibilities. As a leader, you can push back against this impulse by teaching your team about the importance of future-proofing themselves as part of their wider career plan. Training opportunities can future-proof your team by:
- Facilitating networking opportunities that may pay dividends in the future
- Offering certificates that show off your team’s soft skills
- Developing analytic skills (which are likely to be more valuable in the future as more firms complete their digital transformation)
- Recording your employee’s achievements
Offering workshops and training programs is a great way to break down silos and get people working together. You don’t need to spend all week at a workshop, either. Instead, consider integrating learning into daily activities with TED talks at lunch and offering podcast clubs for folks to share ideas. This is crucial if you feel that your team isn’t functioning smoothly due to poor communication and misunderstandings about one another’s roles. By working on collaborative, meaningful projects in training sessions, you can break down barriers and facilitate stronger team relationships.
Remote Teamwork
Teamwork can be particularly difficult to facilitate if you work in a remote environment. Folks who work from home aren’t able to organically meet one another at coffee stations and water coolers and may feel isolated from the rest of the company if you don’t take proactive steps to get folks engaged. You can build remote team relationships during uptraining by:
- Intentionally pairing people on uptraining projects to keep folks accountable
- Listening to your team and taking their feedback on board to improve future training programs
- Setting ground rules so folks don’t take over the call or disengage when in breakout rooms
- Creating activities that are engaging and relevant to your team’s needs
Following these steps should make remote uptraining opportunities fun, too. This is key, as folks are far more likely to bring their best selves to training sessions when they’re engaged in the activities and are having a good time. Hosting fun, engaging uptraining sessions can help you build a more supportive work environment and company culture. Other benefits of remote team-building sessions include:
- Better collaboration
- Increased empathy
- More opportunities for innovation
- Enhanced communication
Utilizing remote team building sessions effectively can convince folks to come forward with their concerns and suggestions, too. This can help you create a supportive environment that benefits all employees.
Supportive Environments
Uptraining your employees should raise productivity and help folks achieve their professional goals. However, without effective leadership, this can quickly devolve into toxic competitiveness that pits your people against each other. As a manager, you can prevent this by using your uptraining to create a more supportive, collaborative environment.
Get the ball rolling by using training to create a feedback-rich environment at work. Embracing feedback shows that you’re open to constructive criticism and care more about creating a pleasant professional environment than protecting your own ego. Hosting workshops themed on giving and receiving feedback can improve your employee’s communication skills and may improve their ability to work collaboratively with one another.
You can also consider giving each employee a continuous learning budget of their own. This lets your team find and participate in educational opportunities that they think will be most beneficial to their career. This can be deeply empowering for employees and ensure that everyone feels supported by your policies.
Conclusion
Building strong team relationships while uptraining your employees is crucial if you’re a leader who cares about productivity, morale, and well-being. Offering cross-departmental training days, you can break down silos and help folks get to know one another. This can be transformative if you work in a remote environment where folks are less likely to meet each other organically. If you do decide to host uptraining sessions, be sure to gather plenty of feedback as this will ensure employees feel represented by the choices you make.