An Employee Individual Development Plan (EIDP) is a written plan devised after line managers collaborate with HR personnel to ascertain how each one of their employees can be developed further.
The main benefits of EIDPs are employees that are more productive, engaged and qualified to deliver. This, in turn, benefits the organization they are working for in several ways. To devise an effective EIDP, factor in the following.
Set goals and objectives:
HR and line managers should set specific goals and objectives for each employee after assessing their strengths, weaknesses and career aspirations. After doing so, employees should be trained and mentored so they can acquire the relevant skills they need to excel in their respective roles.
Establish development-based activities:
Formal classroom or online courses are one way of developing employees. Another and perhaps more effective way is to implement development activities ‘.
These can include line managers working with employees one-on-one on special projects; job shadowing (these require an employee to ‘shadow’ a line manager to observe what they do every day); job rotation (require all employees to ‘rotate’ and do what the other does on a regular basis); and one-on-one mentoring, which requires each employee to be assigned to a mentor who gives them advice and trains them to produce better work on a daily basis.
Gauge leadership potential:
Assessing the leadership skills of each employee should be part of an effective EIDP (sometimes, even the most productive employees do not always have the skills that are required to be good leaders).
It is important to remember that EIDPs can only be effective if line managers set key performance indicators (KPIs) which are communicated to employees and used to evaluate their performance after a certain amount of time (e.g. six months) has elapsed.
By Monica Peter. The writer is an HR professional & a certified trainer at a multinational company.