Tell me how your staff develops and I will tell you how important your company will be
Being competitive is not an independent attribute of the staff, if an organization is competitive it will be because its staff is competitive. The condition of the company is a consequence of the conditions of the resources, mainly the human resource. Based on this premise, staff development is not a requirement to be met by every employer, but an indispensable requirement for the success of any organization.
The human resource formed: the most important thing in a company There are many authors who strongly affirm that the most important resource in the company is the human resource, however through logical reasoning it can be concluded that the human factor transcends its condition of resource to consolidate as the most important thing in a company, along with the value product / service it produces. For this reason Josefina Mota dared to say in 1996 that in the company, the customer does not come first, but the employee. I personally accept this statement only if the employee is trained or at least wishes to do so.
Understanding this reasoning: The mood and knowledge of all staff, mainly the workforce, has an influence on the finished product / service. If the employee is not satisfied with the working conditions, this dissatisfaction originates from a defective product / service. On the other hand, if the employee is happy with his source of work, he makes the vision, mission and objectives of the company his own, committing himself to its success. This reasoning is extended to the strategic level and the middle command of the organization because their behavior and decisions influence the mood and knowledge of the rest of the staff.
Activities aimed at staff development There are several activities that can be carried out in organizations for staff development. The most common is training, however there is another type of activity that is key and that must be differentiated: coaching. This term means to train or advise in English. It can be difficult to differentiate this term from others such as mentoring, training, and even counseling. All these terms also designate activities related to the development of the personnel and that, although they share in part the same objective and the same capacities, they are different according to the aspects that we consider. Active participation in employee development is a function of a team leader.
Coaching can consist of adjusting competencies, orienting which ones need to be acquired or improved, or motivating them to be used. The manager can inform the employee about the execution of their skills and to what extent they adapt to the task. You can guide what skills you need to acquire to get the results that the job requires. It can also intervene when there are beliefs that can positively or negatively influence the employee's confidence and affect their performance. At certain times, occasionally, a manager may be required to take a training action, due to her ability, knowledge and experience. This action may be directed at your own employees or other members of the organization.
In this case you will be exercising the functions of a trainer. When you carry out the coaching you are also training, but in this case you have to worry about the correct learning of the competences, not the work behaviors that they produce, the tasks.
Mentoring has a broader objective: the integration of the members of the organization in all aspects and, of course, especially in performance. At some point, the employee's interests may not coincide with those of the organization. In these cases, the employee must have complete freedom to express himself. In this situation, the person in charge may find it quite difficult to exercise this role because, given his position, he cannot give the necessary unconditional support that is required for the exercise of this function.
Counseling, or psychological counseling, refers to a type of intervention aimed at solving behavioral problems, at a less profound level than psychotherapy. Counseling could be differentiated from coaching in that it is carried out at the request of the person who has requested it, while this can take place at the initiative of the head of the unit. Even with adequate training, it is not appropriate for the person in charge to also carry out this function. Psychological advice requires neutrality and respect for the individual. The counselor must consider the individual independent of the organization.
Online staff development The results of the staff development process, mainly in managerial and middle management, involve above all a personal commitment, so that what is learned in such a process is not ephemeral but is assimilated by the employee in his behavior. It is for this reason that many trainers affirm that the development of the personnel is an attribution of oneself, by virtue of this, a successful person is formed by no one but himself. Although it is not possible to develop face-to-face coaching activities, the network provides all those interested in training with the necessary instruments through specialized portals for distance training. Online masters and specialization courses are now common in virtual classrooms, where live classes are given, if the user has a video-conference connected;If you do not have this accessory, the classes are transmitted via e-mail or through encrypted files.
The distance teacher follows up, through the resolution of exercises, reports that the user sends him. Another important resource of the network is the establishment of Virtual Communities through a listserv (main coordinator) where the members subscribed to such communities raise discussions, debates, opinions and recommendations on the issues raised within these communities. The existence of newsgroups (information groups), which provide various updated information, to the email user registered in this group; In addition to the offer of e-zines, which are not subject to printing costs and can be distributed by the network to the entire world audience, in most cases they are cheaper than traditional printed magazines.The staff development process is important to the competitiveness of any organization.
But for this process to produce the expected results, there must previously be a serious commitment of the organization to the employee and the commitment of the employee to itself.
Bibliography
Kinlaw, Dennis (1996). Coaching: The ASTD Trainer's Sourcebokk. New York (USA): MacGraw Hill.
Debordes, Pascal (1998). Sales coaching. Barcelona (Spain): Gestión 2000. Original edition: Le coaching efficace des comercioux, 1996.
Bell, Chip (1997). Mentoring. Barcelona (Spain): Gestión 2000. Original edition: Managers as Mentors, 1996.
Bittel, Lester (1992). McGraw-Hill Management Course in 36 hours. Madrid (Spain): MacGraw-Hill. Original edition: The MacGraw-Hill 36-Hour Management Course, 1989.
Various authors (1998). Behavioral consulting. Madrid (Spain): Ediciones Pirámide. Fco Javier López Sanz
