Trucking as an industry is not known as being woman-friendly, but Volvo Truck wants to change this and recently completed a landmark Women in Leadership experience for selected women employees.

For Volvo, retaining female employees is a strategic objective and demonstrating the potential for women to advance and move into leadership roles is key to keeping women in the company. The six-month Women in Leadership program demonstrated that the company valued the participants, just by inviting them to program.

“Being nominated was like winning something,” said Volvo employee Tyletha Hubbard. “It felt good to know that I was considered a key talent in the organization.”

All people like to be recognized as valuable to their organizations. This principle holds for men, women, ethnic minorities and people of different generations who appreciate employer-provided training and development. What better way to show an employee that they are needed and that they have place to grow and move up?

Training and development is big business. Training Industry reports that US companies spend $161 billion on it annually. But it's also a cost-effective benefit to provide your employees. Classroom programs can reach dozens at a time for a flat fee. And then you can add back the valued gained from having a more effective workforce.

Training can address hard skills of the job or the soft skills of interpersonal relations and emotional intelligence.

In the benefits industry, you're constantly explaining complicated products that are often fraught with emotion and stress, e.g. health insurance. Presenting benefits plans to clients in a competitive bid is a high-wire act for most salespeople. So, training that focuses on presentation skills, public speaking and body language can give your firm a competitive edge, while building a more confident workforce.

When starting up a training initiative, presentation skills is a great “101” course to include. Most people don't get it in school and most people need a lot of help with it. Not only does learning about presentation skills and interpersonal communication help people sell better, it also helps them “read” other people better and interact more effectively with coworkers.

Presentation skills training is a cornerstone for further development. People who have better interpersonal communications tend to do better in higher level training and, generally, better outcomes in all of their work experiences.

Team building, decision making and leadership development are learning experiences that can also “show the love” from the organization to the employee, while also improving the performance of the firm. The term “learning organization” has become a positive goal for many companies, as a means of becoming more effective through better employee engagement and opening new opportunities within the company.

At Volvo, there is a practice of allowing employees to move laterally from department to department in order to learn new skills and keep work interesting. Its Women in Leadership program encouraged staff to think and talk about what job they might want to try doing next. The policy invites workers to be open about their goals and understand that there's always a place for them. Contrast this with feeling like you're in a dead-end job.

And this is where HR and training can team up.

A recent study by Right Management revealed that, when asked, 68 percent of employees say they really want to talk about their careers with company management. There's even an HR term for it: career conversations. But these conversations are not happening very much.

According to the Right Management white paper, “Only 16 percent of employees indicate that they have ongoing career conversations with their managers and bout their career.”

It turns out most people get their career conversations from managers, colleagues and family. When a promising young manager starts wondering about where her career is going, she might seek out advice from her workmates of parents, but not human resources.

Why not integrate career conversations with training? It's a golden opportunity for your human resources team. Most training engagements include personality assessments and feedback that help participants better understand themselves and others. Also training often concludes with some sort of “what's next” discussion or action plan about how to use what's been learned.

A career conversation that follows such focused introspection will be better informed and will benefit from the afterglow of learning.

It's well documented that financial compensation isn't always the main factor that keeps people from leaving a company. Andrew Chamberlain, an economist with Glassdoor recently wrote about this in Harvard Business Review.

“One of the most striking results we've found is that, across all income levels, the top predictor of workplace satisfaction is not pay: It is the culture and values of the organization, followed closely by the quality of senior leadership and the career opportunities at the company,” writes Chamberlain. “Among the six workplace factors we examined, compensation and benefits were consistently rated among the least important factors of workplace happiness.”

Not feeling valued by management can become an incentive to exit even if it means taking less money in the next job.

Training, development, continual learning experiences and career conversations are proven cost-effective ways to show employees that they are unique individuals who are needed by the organization.

Donna Warrick is president of Jamesson Solutions.

Instant Insights /

How to retain good employees? Make them feel valued.

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