A Guide to Employee Promotions for Your Business

Employee promotions are a magnificent way to help your business thrive and retain employees. Your business can really benefit from offering promotions to those who deserve them, as you’re not just showing your workforce that there are multiple growth opportunities, but you’re growing your business. You can spur your workforce on and help them achieve more in their roles, which instantly helps your business to gain income.

Promotions are a way to make employees feel happy and content with your company and show you care for those who put in hard work and effort. They reward outstanding promotions with opportunities to a different and higher position within the company. This gives the employee more responsibility and complex tasks, allowing them to feel fulfilled with their career and be compensated and rewarded for their dedication.

But how do employee promotions work? Explore this guide to employee promotions for your business to help you understand just why promotions are vital and the process you need to take to help staff level up.

Why promotions can help your business

Promotions can help your business in numerous ways. It doesn’t just benefit the member of staff who receives one, but it boosts your business too.

• Improved job satisfaction: Promotions can make employees feel seen and valued for their hard work which improves their job satisfaction.
• Opportunities for employee development: Employees who have been promoted face new difficulties to help them develop and learn new skills.
• Better growth for your business: Doing internal promotions creates a strong workforce of experienced staff who understand your business goals and mission.
• Increases motivation and productivity: Having more responsibility and more pay that come with promotions can help motivate your staff to perform better and be more productive.
• Better employee retention: Employees will likely stay at your company if they have professional growth and development opportunities.
• Lower your hiring costs: If you promote within your company, you won’t need to hire someone new to fill the position, lowering your hiring costs.

Types of employee promotions

There are a few different types of employee promotions based on your business requirements and strategies. These are:

• Vertical: This is where an employee progresses to a higher position with more responsibilities, compensation, and authority.
• Horizontal: This is when an employee moves to another position that is on the same hierarchy as their current role. They will perform different duties or take on more responsibilities. This may come with better compensation or the same.
• Dry: This type of promotion is when an employee takes on more responsibilities or a more senior job title but without additional benefits or pay.
• Open: Employees who are eligible for a promotion will apply for a vacancy for a higher position. Then HR announces this role publicly to have transparency in the promotion process.
• Closed: With this type, HR and management will choose employees that suit the promotion criteria without announcing it to anyone or the rest of the company.
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How to create a seamless employee promotion process

Whichever type of promotion suits your business most, you will need a seamless and fair promotion process to help guide your management and HR team. This is vital to have as a guideline so that these teams can promote individuals who will boost your business and align with your values.

Create criteria for promotion

To be able to achieve a smooth employee promotion process, you need to create criteria for promotion. This needs to be clear and measurable to make sure that managers and leadership can make the right decisions. The criteria will steer them to choose people based on performance data rather than favoritism. Your criteria for promotion should also align employee growth with your goals. You should factor in role requirements, company values, and business needs.

Set out clear career development paths

Everyone in your organization should have a career development plan that highlights the key performance indicators that are needed to be successful in the role. When you’ve highlighted this, give your staff a development plan and training opportunities to help them succeed. When your workforce has clear career development goals, they understand the route they must go down in order to progress in your company. Plus, it can help management understand when an employee is ready to progress in their career.

Assess performance and potential

You and your management and HR teams will need to assess your employee’s performance and potential to help determine who deserves a promotion. You need to first look at everyone’s current skills and capabilities to help you highlight your top performers. A way to do this is through using the KPIs created in each career development plant. From this, you can assess each employee against those metrics to see if they are ready for promotion. If an employee has completed all their skills and has outperformed their role, they are ready for a promotion. You should also look for top performers which isn’t only about how they perform in their role, but it’s also about someone who excels in teamwork, communication, and building relationships with others.

Work with your management team

After your assessments, you can work with your management team to decide which employees are eligible for a promotion. From that, the HR team and manager will need to get approval from you or senior management. The approval is essential as the chosen person needs to be able to meet your business’s long-term growth plans and objectives.

Communicate decisions

When everyone has agreed with the decision of who to promote, the final decision needs to be clearly communicated to the staff member and the rest of the company. You should speak privately with the chosen employee and the reason why they deserve a promotion. Make sure to congratulate them, acknowledge their hard work, and go into depth about their new responsibilities, goals, and performance expectations. Once this private meeting has been done, get their team together to tell them about the promotion before you announce it to the whole company. This doesn’t have to be a meeting it could just be an internal email or at the next company meeting.

Tweak benefits and compensation

The next stage of the promotion process for your business is to work with your finance team to adjust the compensation and benefits of their role. Assess the pay grade the employee is at right now and determine the appropriate salary increase based on the responsibilities of the new role and similar job roles. You should also look at tweaking the benefits that the role comes with. To do this successfully, you could research competitors and similar job role listings through market research to tailor an attractive benefit and compensation scheme. Make sure the whole package you have created for the new role is in line with laws and regulations and then show this to the employee and get them to sign an updated employment contract.

Use this guide to employee promotions for your business to be able to retain your workforce, interest staff, and show appreciation for hard work and determination. This guide allows you to do seamless and fair promotions that will benefit your staff and your business!