Down the Rabbit Hole…

Many businesses seek to hire seasoned professionals, but few invest enough time and money to make their employee training programs a market differentiator.

Prioritizing profits over employee development may improve the P&L in the short-term, but it ultimately stifles long-term business growth and competitive advantage.

Below are some prominent companies known for their robust employee learning programs, which are integral to their corporate cultures and supported by investments and senior leadership.

1. Google

Why Chosen:

• Comprehensive Onboarding: Google’s “Noogler” orientation is famous for its thoroughness, helping new hires quickly adapt to the company’s culture, values, and roles.
• Continuous Learning: Google offers extensive ongoing education through programs like “Google School for Leaders” and “Grow with Google,” providing opportunities to develop both technical and soft skills.
• Innovative Methods: Google uses various training methods, including peer-to-peer learning, workshops, online courses, and immersive boot camps, ensuring a wide range of educational resources for employees. Google also supports staff working 20% of their time on projects outside their roles.

2. Deloitte

Why Chosen:

• Holistic Development: Deloitte’s training programs cover a wide range of areas, from technical skills to leadership development. “Deloitte University” in Texas is a dedicated facility for training and professional development.
• Leadership Programs: Deloitte offers leadership development programs tailored to different career stages, ensuring relevant training as employees progress.
• Innovative Learning Techniques: Deloitte employs advanced learning technologies, including virtual reality and gamification, to enhance engagement and retention in its training programs.

Both Google and Deloitte have realized many years of solid P&L growth. While you can’t point to training as the sole driver of their healthy P&L growth, being known as a place that invests in its people definitely gives them an edge when recruiting talent. Providing staff with valuable training programs also keeps them more engaged at work, offering employees value that goes beyond just collecting a paycheck. Many jobs offer paychecks; an employee-centric company offers professional growth and makes you better.

The harsh reality is career development often takes a back seat to just keeping up with work. Many companies have also trimmed staff (Google included), leaving those left in their jobs in a cycle of “run faster and produce more with less.” In good times or in challenging times, if your employees’ development isn’t prioritized, it won’t happen, leading to burnout and ongoing retention issues. Google allowing employees to spend 20% of their time on projects outside of their day job has fostered innovations and led to the creation of successful products like Gmail, Google Maps, AdSense, and Google News.

Employee development can be further hindered by managers being rewarded more to meet business KPIs that don’t prioritize mentoring and talent development as a key management success outcome. Managers should be evaluated and promoted based on their ability to develop their team’s skills and motivate personal growth, not just the results their team delivers to the business. Over the long term, how your management team leads and develops the team is more important than just what their team delivers in any given quarter. Bad managers can still get results at the expense of your employees; leaders grow profits with their people.

The technology media today writes of a world where AI systems integrated into businesses will unlock massive efficiencies. To realize this future, it is as important to train your people how to work in this new AI paradigm as it is to train your AI systems to automate your business processes. A human’s performance potential and an AI algorithm’s performance potential both degrade if they don’t continue to learn and be challenged with new concepts and relevant information.

It should be no surprise that companies that prioritize mentorship and training see better employee retention and engagement. As Google experienced with breakthrough product innovations from their 20% policy, breakthrough ideas often emerge during times when employees are allowed to learn and engage in work outside their normal job routines. Some companies may fear highly trained employees may leave for higher-paying jobs. Research shows that employee loyalty to a company actually increases when more educational opportunities are offered. See research from Martini, M., Gerosa, T., & Cavenago, D. (2023) on the impact of employee development on employee turnover intention. To play devil’s advocate a bit, what happens if your employees stay and you don’t invest properly in training them? Your customers will let you know how they feel about your talent development approach when they stop doing business with your outdated team.

Finding time for personal growth in today’s productivity-focused, always-connected world is challenging. Balancing work and family demands makes it even harder to find that precious calendar time needed for professional development. Despite our modern tools and technology, the information age has overwhelmed all of us with too much information to consume, leading to shallow understanding of what we read on our digital screens without much real learning taking place. I have always said, as Google got better at spelling, the worse I became at spelling. We become trapped in a routine of overscheduled work calendars and evenings consuming popcorn digital content that doesn’t challenge us to learn and grow ourselves professionally. Sound familiar?

More than ever, it is now critical that we all make time to develop and learn new skills, as the world we live in is rapidly changing and will demand new skills from all of us. I heard a TED talk recently where Gerd Leonhard said, “If you work like a robot, a robot will take your job.” In the age of AI and robotics, no truer words have been spoken. If your job has you trapped on the hamster wheel of monotony and routine tasks, you don’t have a job—you have a dead-end routine that will soon be programmed into an AI system’s future routine. Take action now. If your company won’t make the time for you to grow, then you must take time back from your weekly calendar to learn new skills and outgrow your company.

Companies that want to be great and stand out from the corporate crowd should integrate learning as a fundamental aspect of their culture and operating procedures. Employee-centric companies should be learning-centric companies. Companies also have the power to redefine the workweek to give their staff the time necessary for continuous growth and learning to actually happen. With all the efficiency AI will bring us, I propose more companies fully embrace a four-day workweek, combined with a dedicated learning day each week. Making time for employees to learn and grow will turn your company into a magnet for the type of talent you want—curious learners looking for opportunities to constantly develop their skill sets.

If everyone treated learning with as much fervor as every business is chasing the latest AI blue pill, we would have much happier employees, where people grow alongside the profits.