The Top Five Ways To Power A Learning Culture With Less

Uncertain economic circumstances can put constraints on a company’s capacity to develop its workforce. Here are five ways leaders can ensure team members can foster learning and advance their performance while working within a reduced training and coaching budget. 

• Consolidate Your Vendors
• Scale Up And/Or Scale Down
• Share Your Budget – Everybody Wins
• Leverage Internal Mentorship Programs
• Expand Your Options

#1. Consolidate Your Vendors

Some vendors offer bundling deals and exclusive offerings to their clients with bigger portfolios. The cost of interfacing such as billing, onboarding new participants, renewals, and user training can add up. HR leaders and end users can spend more time  maximizing the benefits and keep productivity at the pace they need fewer vendors to manage. That includes eliminate underutilized platforms or replace high-cost vendors with more afforable ones that could bring more impact.

#2. Scale Up And/Or Scale Down

Amid uncertain markets and tighter operating budgets, managers especially benefit from training and coaching support. 

• They become more equipped as agile decision-makers. 
• They can manage the environmental stresses of the job before they become bigger issues.
• They can adopt ways to prevent burning out themselves and their team.
• Their coach can inspire innovative problem-solving and help reinvigorate their often overextended brain power.

To ensure the leaders in the organization and their teams retain professional support through budget reductions, HR heads can deploy coaching services that expand and contract in connection with staff needs. A flexible pricing model helps companies or HR heads can avoid spending on underutilized services yet and ensures that the company’s employees receive the support they need. 

Flexible pricing models ebb and flow along with the staffing needs. The unpredictable economy means role shifts and reductions for some firms and a higher occurrence of change among all firms. The employees who are there can get coaching and training at total capacity because budget dollars are going to them specifically. Avoid fee arrangements that rely on averages and blanket programs and look for those that cater to fluctuating corporate makeup. 

#3. Share Your Budget – Everybody Wins 

A combined training and coaching budget can provide an umbrella of services, which can be available to individuals in different departments. It’s a great way to provide a robust array of coaching and development support that would be more costly to secure as individual departments. Managers don’t have to leave anything on the table due to limited investment dollars.

Combining allotments may still result in less than ideal training and coaching budget. In that case, make it count by selecting the development focus that improves the value of all the organization’s offerings. The company’s people determine its value drivers, as McKinsey and Company comprehensively explained in the report Linking Value to Talent. So go deep to determine where performance improvement could most impact the company’s deliverables. Coaching services help firms be able to insure ideal focus and accountability around the key compulsories and up the implementation success. 

The American Society of Training and Development found that 95% of people will meet their goals when they schedule regular check-ins with an accountability partner to discuss their progress.  

#4. Leverage Internal Mentorship Program

Some of the best insights and experience can be gleaned right from within. 

67% of businesses reported an increase in productivity due to mentoring. 55% of businesses felt that mentoring had a positive impact on their profits. 

MentorcliQ’s 2022 Mentoring Report found that during the instability that came with the pandemic, companies that had a mentoring program in place did 53% better financially while those without mentoring programs did 43% worse than other companies on average. 

Sometimes it’s only a matter of connecting the wise minds in the organization with those seeking to grow. But organizing internal programs can pull staff away from more pressing work. By using a support service, like TaskHuman to connect and facilitate relationships organizations can minimize the administrative resources they expend and increase the success of internal mentorship programs. An expert facilitator with a built-in process can expedite the implementation so organizations can begin to reap the rewards sooner than if they had implemented everything on their own. Managers can avoid pitfalls and go straight to a proven strategy that addresses workers’ individual knowledge needs yet utilizes systems that have worked for numerous other organizations. 

#5. Expand Your Options

Deploying outside vendors may make the most sense in terms of bringing specific employees the support they need. Companies may find it more budget-friendly to access outside coaching so that internal staff can focus on working through those challenges with immediate revenue implications. If employees can draw from an outside source for coaching and development in a time when everyone is doing more with less, they’re more likely to receive the time and attention it takes to achieve impactful outcomes. That’s because the coaching support comes from individuals whose sole responsibility is developing employees and leaders. Workers can have a highly focused experience that brings results in a timely manner. 

Make The Most Of Market Challenges

TaskHuman is helping organizations continue to build into their teams, effectively equipping them to compete in a challenging market. Let us show you how you can tap the greatest resource you already have. Companies are using TaskHuman’s state-of-the-art  platform to distinguish themselves in a volatile marketplace through the talents of their people.