5 Easy Ways to Develop Your Team on a Budget

If you want to develop your team on a budget, it can feel like your options are limited. But growing a high-performing team doesn’t mean you need an unlimited budget.

According to our recent study, 64.5% of Gen Zers want mentoring and 40% want coaching.

Investing in team development becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, too: it boosts employee morale, creates a positive team culture, and develops a high-performing team. So then you make more money and have more to re-invest in future team performance initiatives.

But when you’re just starting out and have a limited training budget, you need to get scrappy. So here are five easy ways to develop your team on a budget:

1. Reading

What cheaper way is there to learn than spending hours immersed in a book?

Books are a simple and accessible way to upskill and reskill. And now, books are more accessible than ever. As well as paperbacks and hardbacks, employees have access to ebooks and audiobooks, so they can read in more places and digest information in a way that works for them.

2. Group coaching

A group coaching workshop allows you to reach more employees in less time. Our group coaching workshops can cater to 5 employees up to 60+, helping them with team building activities, professional development, and leadership skills. So then everyone is aligned to help you achieve organisational goals.

3. Mentoring

Mentoring is a powerful way to train your team members. It allows senior team members to share their experiences with less experienced colleagues, creating a culture of learning and knowledge sharing that helps to remove silos and encourage team collaboration.

It can also support succession planning, ensuring that when team members retire their industry and product knowledge don’t retire with them.

4. Reverse mentoring

Reverse mentoring is as equally powerful when it comes to removing silos. It can help challenge generational stereotypes and facilitate knowledge sharing between employees at every level.

Reverse mentoring is when a more junior employee mentors someone more senior. This keeps senior employees aware of industry trends and what’s happening in the day-to-day of the business. It’s also good for diversity.

Older employees choosing to be mentored by those with less business experience further reinforces your company culture of career development and that there’s always more to learn.

5. Volunteering

Volunteering is a simple yet powerful way to give back to your community and your employees. It can also be a driver of employee morale.

Even if an employee doesn’t volunteer somewhere that relates to their job, it could still provide them with a pivotal development opportunity and useful new skills.

For example, Ada Lovelace, often thought of as the world’s first computer programmer, was both a poet and a scientist. These seemingly unrelated skills use different parts of the brain and therefore create different links within it. This allowed her to see problems differently and therefore come up with unique ways to solve problems.

Conclusion

Building a high-performance team doesn’t require a huge training budget. Instead, it’s about spending that tight budget wisely.

Follow best practices for the type of training you want to utilise and ensure that you can track the success of any initiatives you invest. Doing so will ensure that your training initiatives help with employee development and you achieve your business goals.