Why Employee Development Plans Should Be A Part Of Performance Appraisals! – 2024 Guide

Employee development is crucial for a business’s growth. Businesses need to create some strategies or plans to make sure their employees are developing as they would affect the improvement of the business as well.

To follow their development, companies usually create employee career development plans. We think that an employee development plan has to be a part of performance appraisals and we would like to tell you why in this article.

To streamline your performance appraisals…

Teamflect streamlines the process of implementing employee development plans and ensures collaborative and actionable plans that drive both individual and organizational success.

You can incorporate efficiency and effectiveness into your employee development plans with Teamflect today!

What is an employee development plan? 

Have you ever considered the people who have aided your career? Perhaps an HR manager piqued your interest in a new position. An employer who saw your potential and provided you with training that led to a promotion.

A friend or partner who applauded every new professional achievement and still does. Where would you be without their assistance?

Creating an employee development plan allows you to provide the same kind of boost to your own organization’s employees.

An employee development plan can assist both new and experienced colleagues in learning, growing, and advancing. It also has significant advantages for your company.

They differ from personal development plans in that personal development plans are often more focused on life goals than work goals and are owned solely by the individual and supported by the organization where necessary.

Benefits of investing in an employee development plan

Employee development is critical for employees to improve their skills and knowledge so that they can perform better. Employee development activities and training keep employees up to date on the latest developments and what is going on in their environment.

Employee development is essential for both professional and personal growth. Employee development activities prepare people for adversity and the unexpected.

Although there are many individual employee development plan templates online, we suggest you to come up with yours as it would cater better to your needs.

Every employee enjoys learning new skills and expanding their knowledge on the job. They develop a sense of pride when they believe their organization is investing time and resources in their training. Employee development is essential for bringing out the best in people.

Investing in an effective employee development program is a prime example of a win-win situation. Your strategy can benefit both your company and your employees in a variety of ways. Implementing an employee development plan provides the following benefits:

1. Assists in attracting talented candidates.
2. Increases employee engagement and motivation.
3. Improves employee performance.
4. Boosts your company’s efficiency and profitability.
5. Develops promotional candidates.
6. Increases employee retention and satisfaction.
7. Assists your company in making future plans.

These are important advantages to remember and share as you develop your strategy and seek support from managers and decision-makers.

What does the employee development plan completion process look like today?

For most of the companies, the process of employee development plan completion starts by filling a template from Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. The managers usually ask their employees to update their development plans in the period of performance evaluations.

These development plans are usually being updated yearly and totally forgotten until the next performance appraisal period.

However, if you expect your employee to work this plan throughout the year, it should be visited and evaluated more often and we believe that Word or PowerPoint documents are not the right tools for this purpose – let us tell you why in the next section.

Benefits of using digital tools for creating employee development plans

Using digital tools to create an employee development plan have its own benefits:

1. You can easily track every development plan in a central place as a manager or HR administrator
2. Reporting and analyzing the development plans would be easier in digital tools
3. You can quickly find the old development plans in case you need them
4. You may easily request changes via digital tools in case you need

Must-have sections of an employee development plan templates 

Even though there are many different types of development plans available online, their components and steps are nearly identical. To create an effective development strategy, keep the following elements in mind:

• Challenge: An effective plan encourages employees to improve their skills, expand their knowledge, and gain confidence in their roles.
• Support: The plan should include sources of assistance that will assist employees in meeting their objectives. Financial assistance for classes, mentoring agreements, training plans, and other resources are examples of this.
• Assessment: Create clear, measurable indicators of progress and success. Set deadlines, milestones, and deliverables.

If there’s another thing you can take away from these great employee development plan examples, it’s that they don’t have to be complicated to be effective. It only takes a wireframe in Microsoft Word or Excel (although we do suggest digital tools like Teamflect, and a structure to guide people through the process.

People are preoccupied. While everyone values (and expects) ongoing development assistance, it is not always easy to implement.

That is why your development strategy should go beyond simply creating plans that people may not use and instead assist them in growing. Having an actionable employee development plan will create a huge difference in an employee’s career.

5 Steps to Create an Employee Development Plan 

You want to create an employee development program at your company but not sure how you can get started? The first step is creating a development plan template that your employees can use.

1. Consider your company’s objectives: First, consider what individual skills each employee will need to help you meet your business goals, as well as a realistic timeline for achieving these goals. When developing an employee development plan, keep both short and long-term goals in mind.
2. Take into account your employee’s personal and professional objectives: Employee development plans that are collaborative are the most effective. When developing an employee development plan, keep each employee’s personal and professional goals in mind. This allows employees to work on skills and goals that will help them achieve their personal and professional objectives.
3. Make a list of essential resources: After you’ve determined the goals of both the company and the employee, it can be useful to compile a list of resources that will help the employee achieve their professional and personal objectives.
4. Create a clear and descriptive action plan: Include a timeline for each expectation and go over it with each individual employee to ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding action items and deadlines.
5. Continue to look for opportunities for advancement: Assess your progress, measure the results, and consider what new opportunities or challenges will add value to both your employees and the business. Make sure you’re willing to adjust goals and strategies in employee development plans on a regular basis so that you can incorporate any new opportunities that you or your employees discover.

Why should employee development plans be part of the performance appraisals?

Performance evaluations are made monthly or quarterly in companies, making it a part of the development plan would add a speed to the development plan process.

In this way, managers can check whether what is said to be done in the development plan is done at the next performance appraisal time and make an evaluation accordingly.

With Teamflect, employees can create development plans within the scope of the performance review process and their performance review competencies, in addition, this pre-made or custom development plan is automatically included in the next performance evaluation and both parties can add their comments on it.

Who should create the employee development plan?

Is it the employee or the manager? Who is responsible for employee development?

Development plans can be created by both the manager and the employee. Some companies may only want it to be done by the employee, and others only by the manager – when the employee fills in, he adds the points he thinks are missing, but sometimes he may not be aware of his deficiencies.

In addition to the deficiencies that the manager sees only when the manager does it, there may be parts where the employee feels incomplete.

What we see as Teamflect: first the employee creates a working development plan, then goes over this plan together with the manager and if there are missing parts, they meet to add the required parts or edit the plan itself.

According to Teamflect’s detailed research; the statistics of about 3600 development plans created on the Teamflect platform, shows that the 85% of employee development plans are created by the employee, and 15% by the manager.

Conclusion

To conclude all the things mentioned above, we can claim that employee growth is as important as the company growth. Their development areas should be considered by creating achievable employee development plans.

Assembling them with performance appraisals would be beneficial in terms of measuring the performance and development areas in the same template. Creating them in digital platforms would ease the process.

You can use Teamflect to digitalize your performance appraisals and employee development forms. Check out our main features and schedule a demo with us for details!