Team building, decision makingand leadership development are learning experiences that can “showthe love” from the organization to the employee, while alsoimproving the performance of the company. (Photo: Getty)

Trucking as an industry is not known as being woman-friendly, but Volvo Truck wants to changethis and recently completed a landmark Women in Leadershipexperience for selected women employees.

For Volvo, retaining female employees is a strategic objective and demonstrating thepotential for women to advance and move into leadership rolesis key to keeping women in the company. The six-month Women inLeadership program demonstrated that the company valued theparticipants, just by inviting them to program.

Related: How do women and men experience workdifferently?

“Being nominated was like winning something,” said Volvoemployee Tyletha Hubbard. “It felt good to know that I wasconsidered a key talent in the organization.”

All people like to be recognized as valuable to theirorganizations. This principle holds for men, women, ethnicminorities and people of different generations who appreciateemployer-provided training and development. What better way to showan employee that they are needed and that they have place to growand move up?

Training and development is big business. Training Industry reports that US companiesspend $161 billion on it annually. But it's also a cost-effectivebenefit to provide your employees. Classroom programs can reachdozens at a time for a flat fee. And then you can add back thevalued gained from having a more effective workforce.

Training can address hard skills of the job or the soft skills of interpersonal relations andemotional intelligence.

In the benefits industry, you're constantly explainingcomplicated products that are often fraught with emotion andstress, e.g. health insurance. Presenting benefits plans to clientsin a competitive bid is a high-wire act for most salespeople. So,training that focuses on presentation skills, public speaking andbody language can give your firm a competitive edge, while buildinga more confident workforce.

When starting up a training initiative, presentation skills is agreat “101” course to include. Most people don't get it in schooland most people need a lot of help with it. Not only does learningabout presentation skills and interpersonal communication helppeople sell better, it also helps them “read” other people betterand interact more effectively with coworkers.

Presentation skills training is a cornerstone for furtherdevelopment. People who have better interpersonal communicationstend to do better in higher level training and, generally, betteroutcomes in all of their work experiences.

Team building, decision making and leadership development arelearning experiences that can also “show the love” from theorganization to the employee, while also improving the performanceof the firm. The term “learning organization” has become a positivegoal for many companies, as a means of becoming more effectivethrough better employee engagement and opening new opportunitieswithin the company.

At Volvo, there is a practice of allowing employees to movelaterally from department to department in order to learn newskills and keep work interesting. Its Women in Leadership programencouraged staff to think and talk about what job they might wantto try doing next. The policy invites workers to be open abouttheir goals and understand that there's always a place for them.Contrast this with feeling like you're in a dead-end job.

And this is where HR and training can team up.

A recent study by Right Management revealed that, whenasked,  68 percent of employees say they really want totalk about their careers with company management. There's even anHR term for it: career conversations. But these conversations arenot happening very much.

According to the Right Management white paper, “Only 16 percentof employees indicate that they have ongoing career conversationswith their managers and bout their career.”

It turns out most people get their career conversations frommanagers, colleagues and family. When a promising young managerstarts wondering about where her career is going, she might seekout advice from her workmates of parents, but not humanresources.

Why not integrate career conversations with training? It's agolden opportunity for your human resources team. Most trainingengagements include personality assessments and feedback that helpparticipants better understand themselves and others. Also trainingoften concludes with some sort of “what's next” discussion oraction plan about how to use what's been learned.

A career conversation that follows such focused introspectionwill be better informed and will benefit from the afterglow oflearning.

It's well documented that financial compensation isn't alwaysthe main factor that keeps people from leaving a company. AndrewChamberlain, an economist with Glassdoor recently wrote about thisin Harvard Business Review.

“One of the most striking results we've found is that, acrossall income levels, the top predictor of workplace satisfaction isnot pay: It is the culture and values of the organization, followedclosely by the quality of senior leadership and the careeropportunities at the company,” writes Chamberlain. “Among the sixworkplace factors we examined, compensation and benefits wereconsistently rated among the least important factors of workplacehappiness.”

Not feeling valued by management can become an incentive to exiteven if it means taking less money in the next job.

Training, development, continual learning experiences and careerconversations are proven cost-effective ways to show employees thatthey are unique individuals who are needed by the organization.

Donna Warrick is president of JamessonSolutions.