Is it necessary for employer to ask the question – How To Set Personal Development Plan for Employees?
The answer is a resounding yes! Let’s explore why.
Defining a clear path towards personal growth and development in an organization has its benefits to people’s career as well as personal advancement. It is these individual goals or objectives that can produce the best out of workers as a whole and as individuals at the lowest levels. Here we shall look at what personal development is and the way forward in creating a plan for personal development for the employees of an organization.
What is personal development?
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Personal development at the lowest level is the steps to take to further the ability of the individual in an enterprise or organization. It would more often than not lead to a more organized individual and a better performing worker at all times. A large number of companies or employers tend to take stock of an employee by using personal development traits or points.
Often it has been noticed that companies and employers that tend to have clear cut goals or targets for their workers to aspire to, would be able to get the most out of these workers as well. So rather than see personal development goals as stand alone features of an organization, it is best to see them as being holistic to the overall development of the individual.
How To Create Personal Development Targets for Places of Work?
The following goals or steps can be used to have a sense of direction and fulfilment in any work atmosphere and work place. They are to be seen as a whole and not as individual items in a plan so that the worker that follows them would find benefit to having followed them.
1. Creating a vision
It is important for any business unit or work place to create a vision for their existence. Simply making money cannot be the ends to any business activity. There must be goals that the workers of the company must aspire to fulfil. For instance, when Microsoft was started by Bill Gates, he had a vision for his workers and company and that is to place a computer on every table in every home. The actions that followed were always focused on this vision that the founders had for Microsoft.
2. Developing a plan
Once a vision has been laid out for a company or work place, the next step is to develop a plan to bring to fruition the vision that the promoters have for their enterprise. Often it is seen that work places do not transfer the vision that they had for their business to the employees. This can happen if there is no plan to carry out the vision.
The plan must be time bound and target oriented. This would enable the workers to strive to improve themselves on a daily basis and to set targets. Thus, it is important to understand the workers and bring out a plan that can be executed by them to its finest detail.
3. Tracking the progress
For every business plan to be successful it is important to track out the progress as people follow the plan. This would create a time bound execution of the plan in most instances and would call for using resources in a time bound manner. Having an effective means to track the progress of any plan in an organization would also mean that daily functioning of the company is also under control.
There are a large number of software tools that can be implemented at places of work to help with tracking the progress of a business plan. For large enterprises, it is possible to have a custom plan developed for implementation that truly reflect the ideals of the promoters. Since most trajectories are tracked with respect to the resources expended and time taken to achieve the goal, it is most likely that places that do have steps to track the progress of a plan are also the ones that pull out a successful transformation.
4. Plan review
By reviewing a plan periodically and often enough, it is possible to know if a particular organization is staying its course. It is easier to make corrections to an action at the closest instance to its inception than when it has been carried forward in the working of the organization.
Thus, a successful plan review throws up what is lacking in the implementation of a plan and it becomes easy to implement changes to the plan accordingly. Most companies tend to have a plan review annually but in current business environment, it is advisable to have a review closer to each other.
Most enterprise resource planning packages tend to stress the need to periodically review the progress of the organization. It would be best to have an application in use that will truly reflect on the culture and ethos of the organization in question.
Examples Of Personal Development Goals
It is clearly hard to lay out what constitutes personal development goals for individuals or companies as a whole. For instance, the goals of the HR team would be different from the software development team in a software company. So, the street-smart way of ensuring people in an organization feel wanted and are pushed to excel themselves is to have some common meeting points that can be followed by everyone in the working organization.
Some of the personal development goals are as set out below.
· Better Time Management
Employees need to get a handle on how they can manage their time better. Poor tome management can create ineffeive employees.
· Improve Emotional Intelligence
Even though an employee may be good at work, working well with others requires an entirely different skillset. Building emotional intelligence will assist the employee manage their and other’s emotions well and ultimately bring about a harmonious work environment.
· Cultivate The Habit of Resilience
Personal, financial and relationship problems assail all individuals. Other than that there are problems at the work place that need to be resolved as well. Developing resilience is a key skill that can help all individuals overcoming their personal and and work related problems.
· Listen Attentively
Listening is very different from hearing. It is skill every leader and team member has to have .Listening well can avoid conflicts and misunderstandings in the workplace and improve the workplace environment drastically.
· Develop A Mindset for Growth
A growth focused mindset will promote the creativity, motivation and learning abilities of an employee. These are crucial components for improving employee performance.
· Encourage Reading Books of Some Kind
Reading books is the easiest ,time tested and the most straight forward way to progress in self development. Other methods such as training or mentoring are equally helpful too but not as easy.
· Get To Learn New Things
Upgrading skills require constant learning. In fact the principle of ‘Kaizen’ (Japanese for continuous learning) can be a powerful tools for personal development.
· Improving Public Speaking
Public speaking is not just for developing oratory skills for the employee. It builds self esteem and confidence when consistently done. An employee with greater self esteem and confidence can improve their performance and effectiveness in leaps and bounds as compared to others who lack these.
· Meeting New People
New people ,new ideas and new experiences. Meeting new people will open up the mind horizons and further help improve qualities of leadership, cooperation and understanding in individuals.
It is to be noted that each set of activity recommended in the above would get to involve the person more deeply in the organization. Most people when they do focus on the above points would get to learn something new and a new skill set is learnt. If nothing else, the above points would make out a better person our of people.
Conclusion
In a complex field as personal development, it is those folks that stick to learning something new that will benefit from the experience. Most companies do stress the need to set goals and of this process is coupled with a sense of direction then personal development would follow.
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