The Case For Encouraging Employees To Explore New Skills

When you explore the potential of horizontal growth opportunities, wherein your employees develop new skills to complement their current proficiencies, what you’re likely to find is that your employees are even more capable than you already know them to be. Aside from the benefits your employees experience from learning new skills, your company will benefit as well.

A lot of career trajectories position employees in ways that allow them to keep building off of their strengths, which is great. Having employees with powerhouse skills certainly can’t hurt. However, I’d argue that it can be more beneficial to let your employees develop related skill sets at work.

Here’s why: Marketing, and especially digital marketing, is an industry characterized by rapid change, the need for innovative thinking, and the ability to act quickly. After all, it can be difficult to capitalize on a trending hashtag if your marketing campaign has to traverse three different departments and five different hands.

When you explore the potential of horizontal growth opportunities, wherein your employees develop new skills to complement their current proficiencies, what you’re likely to find is that your employees are even more capable than you already know them to be. Aside from the benefits your employees experience from learning new skills, your company will benefit as well.

Processing Time Will Speed Up

When employees develop supporting skill sets, you inadvertently remove waiting time from client projects and internal processes.

Say, for example, that some of your designers dabble in Web development as well. If you were to encourage those employees to keep building out their skill sets by doing some hands-on learning with internal projects, they would likely gain insights that could help with client projects later. Then, rather than bothering your Web dev department with additional, small coding tasks here and there, some of your designers might be able to handle those tweaks on their own. In this case, your design team would get a project done faster and your dev team would remain uninterrupted.

Of course, there will always be a learning curve when someone is expanding knowledge in a new skill set. However, in terms of time saved, I think this practice is extremely valuable. Yet, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

You’ll Have Extra Help When You Need It

Regardless of your industry, a productivity-killer for many companies is employee absenteeism. According to a 2013 survey on the financial effects of employee absences, 75% of responding employers said absenteeism has a moderate to large impact on company revenue and productivity. On average, managers spent an average of more than four hours a week dealing with absences, which includes adjusting the day’s workflow, finding replacements, and training the person covering absent employees. This equates to about five weeks every year spent handling company absences.

What would mitigate some of that lost productivity and managerial time? Having an employee in your office who already has some of the skills you need.

If you allow your employees to develop skill sets that complement their primary job descriptions, they’ll be better able to help out when someone calls off, even if that person works in another department. Sure, that employee may not be able to knock out entire projects for your sick team member, but he or she may be able to troubleshoot problems or mediate a project’s assignment to another team member.

You’ll See New And Creative Ideas

In addition to saving time and lost productivity, letting employees explore new skills benefits your business creatively. Just like taking a class in college or learning a new language, the information your employees learn from fostering new skill sets gives them alternative perspectives from which to view the world.

This translates into new perspectives for design projects, content creation, and new marketing concepts. Innovation is a sought-after skill in the marketing industry. Make it easier for your teams to access innovative thinking by helping them expand their mindsets with tangentially related perspectives.

The way I see it, you can never learn too much. Letting employees explore skills that complement the ones they already have is an efficient way to foster innovation and faster processes—and stave off productivity lulls caused by absenteeism. Your employees will likely enjoy the boost in skills, too.