From Problem-Solving to Analytical Skills, These Employee Training Programs Will Foster Innovation

On-site training suffered considerable changes during the pandemic due to employees having to work from home. This situation increased the number of hours spent on training by employers since hybrid or remote working was necessary for maintaining a stable health level. However, after the pandemic ended, fewer companies provided a thorough training program since most workers got back to the office, where superiors could better manage them. 

Unfortunately, failing to offer proper employee training has numerous adverse effects on a company. The problem is most businesses have recently used as an excuse the financial problems the world is facing that have led to increased taxes and overall material prices. Not managing expenses well, neglecting employee engagement and also failing to find focus is a fatal combination to poor training.

If you want to foster innovation and develop as a business, you must identify the pain points in your organisation, after which you need to seek the best programs that suit your needs and budgets. So, here’s what to target. 

Problem-solving skills are helpful in any industry 

Regardless of the nature of your business, training employees in forming or improving their problem-solving skills will surely boost profit and productivity. This ability will help your employees listen actively during meetings, come up with creative solutions after analytically viewing the situation and work together with their co-workers. 

As a business owner, you’ll notice that after developing this skill, your team will use time and resources more efficiently than before, while responding to changing customer behaviours will help anticipate business risks. 

You can plan the introduction of this asset with Black Belt certifications through the Lean Six Sigma Company, which will automatically offer your team a lifetime skill. At the same time, it would be best to contribute to this training by promoting a company culture that spurs innovation and collaboration. Training without sustainable support from your business might not be efficient in the long term.

Business savviness is essential for upper-management positions 

Besides regular employees, management should be trained consistently to lead teams better. That’s because if the team is adequately guided toward success, they can achieve better results with less time and effort. 

Understanding how things should be done through specific knowledge is known as business acumen, and it’s used to empower employees through distributed leadership and decision-making skills. Besides these requirements, a person in leading positions should acquire leadership, communication and situational awareness skills. 

Getting a mentor would be the best decision to help managers evolve because they can provide instructions on the following:

• Improving one’s financial literacy on business data, metrics and statements;
• Analysing growth strategies for potential business models;
• Staying up to date with trends on social media;
• Understanding customer changing behaviours;
• Learning to embrace failure and learn from it;

Analytical skills are required for big tech businesses 

While analytical skills might not be that necessary for creative jobs, they’re essential for big tech companies. Whether we talk about leading roles or regular tasks, people who are able to break down any type of information will bring unmeasurable value into an organisation. 

Unlike other skills, analytical ones require a more fixed and mathematical approach since people must be constantly working on them. Becoming an analytical person requires creating certain habits for learning, which are similar to studying a new language. 

Analytical skills are built up through extensive reading, stimulating the brain through solving mathematical problems. Having debate clubs or becoming more observant of the work environment also contributes considerably to people becoming analytically skilled. 

Emotional intelligence can reduce stress in the office 

Emotional intelligence training might be the most underrated program because it deals with something less talked about― our feelings. While companies are usually oriented to develop technical skills, achieving success as a business also means prioritising self-awareness and social awareness in the office. 

This type of training focuses on employees’ and managers’ abilities to resolve conflict, communicate efficiently and work as a team despite previous challenges. This helps every company’s workers to move to the next level of innovation since they’ll be calmer in times of crisis or better handle upset customers. 

What’s more important is that prioritising emotional intelligence can help minimise stress, which is one of the main reasons why employees quit their jobs. Burnout is widespread, and while some workers will learn to manage stress and workload, sometimes managers simply can’t analyse and determine how to spread tasks for a balanced environment. 

Negotiation skills are helpful in any situation 

Most of the time, we’re used to thinking that being a good negotiator is applicable only when talking to customers or discussing a higher salary. However, negotiation skills are useful in numerous situations, from extending a team’s deadline for a project to solving an internal conflict.

Being a good negotiator takes time because every person has different personality traits that can be more or less leveraged to convince other people of their abilities. An excellent exercise for employees would be to track their daily negotiations, from the smallest to the most important, and take their observations to the guiding team to find the best strategy based on their personality. 

Negotiators must establish trust, meaning they must have great relationships with their team department. This helps in their negotiation process considerably since they will find common ground with the person facing them. 

But what’s more important to negotiate successfully is being ready to improvise in moments that weren’t planned. When things go wrong, a good negotiator knows how to turn the situation to their benefit without neglecting the other party’s wishes. 

Final considerations 

Seeking the best employee training programs can be time-consuming, especially if you don’t know what to target to improve your company. But regardless of the industry area you work in, it’s best to build a skill base for the entire team so everyone is on the same page. Among these competencies, we recall problem-solving, critical thinking and negotiation skills. But the soft and hard skill list is considerably more extended, so make sure to improve what’s needed in your team truly.