Grow your own

Staff development is one of the most important, yet often misunderstood, aspects of running a successful business. If your employees aren't progressing, neither ?will the firm.

Some companies don't offer ?internal promotions. This demotivates staff and underuses their talents leading to a high staff turnover. If you want to retain and incentivise employees, you have to make them feel that they are part of the firm's future.

Effective staff development involves teaching your workforce about their responsibilities and developing their skill sets to help achieve corporate goals along with personal targets. This means creating a structure of continuing professional development, which includes soft skills, such as public speaking, networking and management, as well as technical skills.

Surprisingly, not all firms are on board and some are unsuccessful in their efforts. This year's Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) Learning and Talent Development Survey noted that only 57 per cent of respondents undertook talent management; of those, only 8 per cent (up from 6 per cent last year) considered their activities to be "very effective".

However, 63 per cent considered their activities "fairly effective" up from 50 per cent in 2012 and 44 per cent in 2011.

Sound advice

So where should firms focus their activities? The CIPD survey showed that the most effective ways to develop staff were coaching, development schemes, and mentoring and buddying programmes. Coaching and development schemes, especially where they are developed in-house, have always been effective, focusing on and monitoring specific skill sets. However, the staff must be fully engaged and committed.

Mentoring is a more recent innovation and Reeves is introducing the initiative. It's a voluntary scheme that allows staff to choose anyone from the partnership to use as a sounding board and career guide.

Evidence indicates that those people with mentors develop faster and further than those without. Ultimately, we believe that what is good for the individual will also be good for the firm. I heard a story recently about a brave junior employee at a multinational firm emailing a senior executive with a reputation for being unapproachable and aggressive asking if they mentor. To everyone's surprise, the senior executive agreed and the junior has never looked back.

The CIPD survey also revealed the least effective development tools, such as external courses leading to a management qualification. These were deemed effective by just 10 per cent of respondents. Even less effective were external secondments, which were deemed effective by ?3 per cent of respondents.

So, in what area does staff development fall down the most? According to the survey results, it is in people management and leadership areas - perhaps no surprise to many employees. It is very difficult to teach people management, and some do not recognise shortcomings in their own performance. Ability is often innate and cannot really be learnt. Those that do try too hard often come over as being insincere and untrustworthy.

As a firm's requirements and goals are constantly changing, staff development plans must be reviewed on a regular basis. This should be an ongoing process of setting targets and developing skill sets. Responsibility for identifying and meeting development needs lies mainly with the employee, and their line manager.

But communicating how skill requirements are changing sits on the shoulders of senior management.

Geraint Jones is a private client partner at Reeves

He writes the regular in-practice article on doing business for Private Client Adviser