Join us as we explore one of the most powerful and often underused levers for competitiveness: employee development.
In the latest episode of Great Talks, host Beth Taylor, Content Manager at Great Place To Work UK, is joined by Jon Rice, Consultant, and Abi Animwa, Senior Insights Manager.
In this episode, we continue our journey through the Great Place to Work Effect, the idea that when leaders build high trust cultures, employee experience improves, culture strengthens, and organisations see better performance as a result. For a closer look into what the Great Place To Work Effect is, download the report or listen to the first episode in the series here.
Across the UK right now, many businesses are grappling with low productivity, limited agility, and slowing innovation. In response, it's easy to focus on quick fixes, like new technologies.
But sustaining innovation, agility, and productivity needs more than new tools or processes. It requires a workplace culture where employees feel trusted, supported, and empowered to grow. Listen below to explore how building a culture of continuous development, grounded in trust, fuels agility and innovation, and helps organisations keep pace in a rapidly changing environment.
Organisations that do development well view it as more than just a tick box exercise. Growth is ongoing, intentional, and embedded in the everyday.
As Jon shared, "continuous development means employees become more confident in taking on new challenges, which improves their responsiveness, their problem solving, and their day-to-day performance. That's how development becomes an operational lever, rather than just an HR-offering."
Trust is the foundation of the Great Place To Work Effect, and a vital enabler for meaningful development.
As Abi shared, our latest UK Workforce Study found that 82% of employees in high-trust workplaces access development opportunities compared with just 9% in low-trust environments.
"That means when trust is high, employees are far more willing to develop," she elaborates. And the benefits aren't just felt by employees: "by building transferable skills, encouraging experimentation, and increasing confidence, high-trust, high-development organisations create the breeding ground for innovation, agility, and productivity."
Trust isn't just integral to developing your employees: it is the prerequisite for developing your organisation, too. Successful transformation depends not just on what is changing, but on how supported people feel as they adapt: leaders must focus as much on confidence and trust as on tools and processes.
In high‑trust environments, employees engage with change. They build new skills, ask questions, and develop confidence as their roles evolve. When it comes to AI, for example, "employees in high trust environments are five times more likely to feel confident and optimistic", shared Jon. "Because they're allowed to have that pace of change be a priority with the business, they're allowed to ask questions, and really have that
psychological safety to not just be told to blindly accept something, but to be there every step of the process."