Human Assets

A Way to a Brighter Future / Development Culture

What is a development culture?
An organisation with a development culture focuses energy on ensuring that their employees are continually developing and learning, whilst rewarding them for contributing to organisational success.

Why strive for it?
Organisations are under ever increasing pressures from competition, increased demand for quality, productivity, and customer service.  The result of which, Peggy Simonsen (1997) believes, is diminishing loyalty in both directions - employee to organisation, and vice versa, which will ultimately lead to a competitive culture.  A way to avoid such a culture is to develop trust, collaboration and continuous learning.  The assumption is that an individual who continually develops within their role will perform more effectively and will gain more personal satisfaction, therefore contributing more to business results.

Who needs to be involved?
All employees within the organisation need to be involved to ensure that the transition to a new culture is smooth.  There will be specific roles and responsibilities for all employees, including senior managers and HR personnel.  A team of people will have the most critical role of being responsible for supporting and guiding all initiatives; commonly referred to as change agents.

How to achieve it?
Self-managed development
A development culture is, however, more than just encouraging staff to update and broaden their skills.  Employees are expected to manage their own development.  You may expect companies striving to achieve such a culture to assess staff on competencies such as; development orientation, self responsibility, change orientation - adaptability and business awareness.  All these competencies are projecting the philosophy that each individual in the organisation makes a difference to its success.  A difference which comes about through individual contribution.

Alignment of Human Resource systems
Peggy Simonsen believes that career development is the key to changing a culture, particularly, the integration of employee career development systems with future business needs and organisational goals and strategies.  This enables staff to gain extrinsic and intrinsic reward for their contributions and ongoing development.  It would also benefit the organisation to align other HR systems such as performance management and succession planning.