Building a resilient business team takes a village. As a leader, it is your role to ensure your team has the support and resources needed to collaborate with each other. Moreover, you need a system in place that ensures all team members have the same working knowledge of your business and products.
In the past, a learning management system (LMS) was essential for providing employees with educational opportunities for professional growth.
Yet, today’s workforce is larger and more complex than ever, with multiple departments acting simultaneously to achieve company goals. As a result, most LMS solutions aren’t cutting it, requiring businesses to adopt a more innovative approach to employee learning.
To build a resilient team and boost talent retention, you need a platform that enables your employees to not only do their best work but also to collaborate effectively and gain a better understanding of your business as a whole — not just their specific department.
What is employee enablement?
Employee enablement is a strategic approach to providing employees with support and resources.
For employee enablement to be successful, your employees need to feel truly confident. This confidence starts from a point of engagement — such as encouraging teams to communicate more frequently and ensuring all teams are working towards the same central business goal.
However, employee engagement is only the tip of the iceberg.
Employee enablement takes employee engagement to the next level by not only encouraging teams to communicate and collaborate more frequently but by also providing the proper tools, training, and educational resources for these teams to do so.
Together, employee engagement and enablement work together to build a better overall workplace experience, leading to employees feeling both motivated and empowered to do their jobs.
Moreover, employee enablement focuses on boosting talent retention, with one of the strategy’s primary goals being the improvement of employee attitudes toward the company.
Before you buy: important employee enablement business considerations
While LMS platforms have been around for years now, employee enablement platforms are newer on the scene. Despite this, the advantages of employee enablement have quickly hooked the attention of business leaders across all industries, spiking the number of employee enablement platforms available.
As such, before you even begin researching different employee enablement platforms, it is vital to first outline what you hope to get out of such a platform and what goals you hope to achieve.
When choosing an employee enablement platform, consider the following three factors:
Your business objectives
The most important first step to take on your journey to adopting an employee enablement platform is to clearly define your business objectives. For example, if your current onboarding process for new hires is clunky and inefficient, then one of your main goals for your employee enablement platform implementation should be to improve this process.
Current pain points
Employee enablement platforms can help you eliminate pain points in the communication and collaboration processes in your business — but only if you know where and what those pain points are. This makes it incredibly crucial to go through your various business processes and identify where employees are encountering roadblocks or where they feel inhibited from doing their best work.
Employee feedback
Going hand-in-hand with identifying pain points in your business processes is asking for employee feedback. No one can illuminate problems in your operations better than your current employees, so asking them for their feedback on what improvements they would like to see can be significantly helpful.
Choosing an employee enablement platform: key features to prioritize
After identifying your business objectives and current pain points in your business processes — as well as receiving essential feedback from your employees — it’s time to choose a platform.
In your search for the ideal employee enablement platform, prioritize these five features:
Mentorship features
Mentorship is crucial in employee enablement. When choosing a platform, look for a solution with advanced mentorship tools, such as the ability to automatically identify the best people to serve as instructors and tools for creating the ideal pairings of mentors and mentees.
Automated workflows
The more automation, the better. By choosing a platform that provides powerful and automated workflows, you can greatly boost the efficiency of your employee enablement strategy. For example, automated workflows can be employed to send calendar invites and reminders at highly specific times for employee training sessions.
Blended learning
To empower employees, you need to respect their individuality. A truly great employee enablement platform should provide you with the ability to enable blended learning — an approach to employee education and training that includes both individual and team learning sessions. Additionally, blended learning tools should also allow you to offer learning courses and workshops in a variety of mediums, including both live events and digital experiences.
Analytical capabilities
No employee enablement platform is complete without robust analytical capabilities. Tools that allow you to easily run assessments, send out surveys, gather feedback, and other key analytical tasks are critically important for analyzing the success of your strategy. These analytical capabilities should also simplify your progress tracking and reporting as well.
Codified knowledge
Empowering your employees means providing them with access to all of your business knowledge, regardless of its relevance to an employee’s specific department. An exceptional employee enablement platform should offer codified knowledge tools that enable you to create, distribute, and store all of your documents and resources in an easy-to-access location.
Final thoughts: enable engineering & tech teams with PlusPlus
Empowering your team to be fully enabled is vital — especially when those teams are dealing with complex products and business processes, such as software development and deployment.
The PlusPlus employee enablement platform is designed with the complexities of tech and engineering teams in mind. We built our platform to provide engineering and tech teams with the support, resources, and technological innovation needed for these teams to thrive.
From helping you establish a standard set of best practices to creating a codified knowledge base complete with blended learning experiences, PlusPlus helps your business drive talent retention.
Book a PlusPlus employee enablement platform demo today to discover all our solution has to offer.
