No one will argue that your employees are the most important asset of any company. In fact, it might be one of the most cliche things to say these days... Despite all the fluff around the subject, I do not see a lot of companies putting their money where their mouth is. In this short article, I will outline how we try to do it the other way around. Building a company from scratch with a heavy emphasis on making people better versions of themselves - professionally and yes personally. You do bring both of them to work every day - we think that actually makes a lot of sense.
Being in the recruitment industry this becomes even more visible because we do not deal with products or software but with people and only people...
Well for us the most important answer is: happy employees mean happy clients. And happy people tend to stay put meaning; creating a lower turnover of staff. It is a hugely overlooked topic in my opinion. Besides making sure that people stay put - which doesn’t add anything to the bottom line - you want your people to keep developing and improving their existing skillset. This does add direct value to your team, clients, and thus your company.
Perhaps even more important - you want to install a culture of continuous learning within your organization. People helping each other out with fresh ideas and new insights. In order to achieve this we have set-up an internal training method (periodically) which is based on 3 main pillars:
Weekly: E-learning Modules (we use SocialTalent for that)
Monthly: Classroom Masterclasses (with our KeenAcademy)
Quarterly: Personal Coaching (Personal Development Training)
Not really a pillar but still a lot of fun which is fundamental to our company culture:
Yearly: Citytrip to meet industry peers & get inspired (Last year we went to Berlin and did on-site visits with TalentWunder, N26, and Zalando. Our trip to Dublin had to be canceled due to COVID19).
Randomly: a member of our team teaches the others about a new tool they use and the best tricks they use like Slack, Trello, Calendly, etc.
The purpose of this set-up is simple but effective to make sure that everybody who joins us gets the possibility to make their own learning curve as steep as they can handle (or are motivated to). Basically, we offer the input so they can decide how to maximize their output!