Everyone agrees that without employee engagement, your company will struggle to achieve its full potential. But how do you cultivate and sustain it, particularly in a job market that makes it more challenging to retain top talent? To compete for both talent and market share, you must be prepared to invest in your employees’ professional development and instill in them a sense of connection to your company’s fortunes and future. To get there, you should consider:

• Creating a rewarding experience. This includes compensation and benefits, but that’s just one part of the equation. Recognizing and rewarding your people publicly for their contributions, offering a range of unique perks, and helping your people find meaning in the work they do all come into play.
• Building personal paths to growth. Career development is critical, regardless of the size of your firm. To get there, you need to work with your people to determine what they need in terms of development, using reviews to help define and shape those opportunities.
• Creating an organizational path to growth. What does success look like for you and your team in five to 10 years? You need to align your employees’ individual roadmaps for professional development with your long-term plans for the company, and strengthen those connections wherever possible, primarily by giving employees the responsibilities they want and can handle.

Giving employees paths to growth empowers the business and individual members of your team to advance together with a shared sense of purpose and a strong, enduring commitment to realizing your performance goals.

Read the third in our series of Connections to Growth: Team guides, Tactics and Tech to Put Your People on Paths to Growth, to learn how helping employees achieve their professional development goals can drive the growth of your company.