Want to Build the Best Team on Earth? The Secret Isn’t Hiring, It’s Development

Building an Employee Development Plan as a Master Plan for Your Human Capital Strategy

We all know talent is the most important resource for a technology startup. As companies get into the expansion stage, they have to take their talent acquisition capability up a notch in order to maintain the burgeoning rate of growth. For example, if they needed to hire one or two employees a month before, now they need to hire 10-20 per quarter.
OpenView is keenly aware of that need, and we have invested heavily into our recruitment support for our portfolio companies. At OpenView Labs, we have a team of six full time talent specialists who help our portfolio companies recruit a wide range of positions, from front line sales executives and back-end engineers to UX designers, marketing managers, and executives like CFOs, VPs of Product. We also help our portfolio company build their own “talent factory” — a disciplined, scalable approach for acquiring and retaining talent in the expansion stage.
However, just as economic principles require that companies try to both acquire customers and retain them, in order to truly power YOUR company’s explosive growth in the expansion stage a great human resource team needs to be great at both talent acquisition as well as talent retention and development.

Employee Retention & Development is Just as Important as Talent Acquisition

Too many companies tend to neglect the current employee development process, either because they do not want to deal with the “perceived” overhead, or because of a persisting “startup” mentality — everyone will grow as fast as possible with the company, learn through trial and error, and naturally find a right place for themselves.
This mentality is a powerful force of self-motivation, an incredible source of innovation, and engine of growth for a company in the early stage. However, in the expansion stage, more employees are added in a wider range of roles, responsibility and expertise, and it is impossible to assume that everyone will develop at the same pace and find a place that is most suitable with them. They may quickly find that the work is overwhelming, or that there is no clear developmental path for them in the long term for the company, and will be tempted to look elsewhere for better development opportunities.
Therefore, organizations will need to formalize the career development of its employees, which benefits both the company and the employees. The employees have more certainty in their long-term career development plan and the ability to actively manage their career, while the company retains and grows its talent, and is actually to plan for future talent growth and development.

7 Steps to Building an Employee Development Plan

How do we put in place such a mechanism without creating too much HR overhead for the organization? Consider the following seven steps, which are the habits of highly successful talent organizations:
1) Define clear paths and development routes for each junior and mid-level role in the organization, and establish a process to actively monitor and track the development of the employees, benchmarking their performance against the plan on a regular basis.
2) For each role, the developmental path should not be a short-term 1-2 year plan (that is the job of annual goals), but rather take a more long-term look into the future. The path should be defined as a combination of the following aspects:

• Progression of the employee’s role, scope of authority, and responsibility
• Expectation of career achievements/contributions that define each increasingly senior roles/positions
• Hard skills (technical skills, domain knowledge, certification) expected at each level/position
• Soft skills (leadership, communication, consensus building) expected at each level/position
• The future opportunities and challenges for the employee in each level/position

3) Develop a set of standards/measurements that allows the company and its employees to objectively assess the employee’s performance and ability at each of the level of the development plan here.
4) Define cross-functional developmental paths so there are opportunities for people to switch between different business lines and career paths, if they have the skills and knowledge.
5) Set aside management time for development, taking into account the employee development plan is not a one-off initiative. It should be considered a major part of the long term’s human capital strategy, and requires the support and involvement of not only the HR executives, but also the rest of the management team.
With the leadership’s support, the employee development plan gains more credibility with the employees, leading to higher participation and higher achievement.
6) Communicate the plan and the process to the whole organization in the most transparent way possible. Expect questions or even disagreements, but try to win the opposition to your side.
7) Review and adjust elements of the employee development program on a regular basis, especially when the company’s change in strategy, leadership, or with a major acquisition.
How do you actively address your employee development and retention?