Importance of Employee Development - Essay Example

Employee development enhances productivity not only in terms of making employees effective and efficient in doing their jobs. It also develops loyalty among employees in addition to motivating them to do better in their jobs. Thus, the immediate benefit of employee development is having employees who are motivated and competent who are loyal to the company, and therefore likely to stay in the company.

The benefits of having competent and motivated employees are in multitude. The most obvious benefit is efficiency and efficacy in doing their jobs. Materials turnover will decline, overhead expenses will lessen and new processes will be discovered that will further enhance productivity. In short, expenses will be lessened and output will be optimized by a highly trained workforce wrought by employee development programs (Hameed and Waheed, 2011).

The benefit of having a loyal workforce which is a result of an effective employee development program cannot be discounted. While their benefits may not be obvious, their effect can be felt in the organization. Without employee development that will foster company loyalty, there will be a high turnover and attrition rate that is not only costly but time-consuming as well. Employee recruitment is costly and could be avoided if employees are loyal to the company.

The money spent for recruiting new employees could instead be used somewhere else. The lost productivity of an employee who left can also be counted as a cost to the company. In addition, a company has also to spend more resources on training a new hire. After training, a new hire cannot be expected to have the same productivity as the old employee as he or she still has to learn the ropes of the new job. It takes time also to acclimatize to the new organizational culture that facilitates productivity and performance. This process costs money to the company in terms of lost opportunity which could have been done by an old employee. As all human resource professional knows, learning curves are expensive to acquire. All these unnecessary expenditures could be avoided by embarking on an effective employee development program that not only makes the company’s employees better but also fosters loyalty to the company.

Employee development may cost money, but its cost can be readily offset by the multitudes of benefits that the company will reap (Gresham, 2006).