Looking for ways to assess the impact of your Organisation’s training? Look no more!
Good training programmes cost a lot of money and even the cheap ones still cost your organisation some money. As an HR professional, looking for a way to justify this expense is a concern for you. However, you are certain that learning outcomes transferred on the job will improve the organisation’s bottom line, so scrapping training is not an option.
The question is; how do you prove this?
Times Have Changed
The problem of evaluating the effectiveness of your training when the outcomes involve soft skills such as teamwork, creativity and strategic thinking is mind boggling. It can be difficult to assign a Naira value to such skills, or to show a relationship between the learning initiative and the acquisition of the targeted skills.
The inability to measure the impact of training may be because the approach most organisations and HR practitioners take for learning and development is fundamentally flawed – they make a list of skills required during the period under review, identify facilitators, get adequate venues and select a range of people to attend. At the end of the training, they distribute “smiley sheets” with questions relating to venue and facilitator’s style (with HR executives playing roles of Admin staff rather than strategic HR) and file them away as feedback on the training.
In the past, Executives may see feedback and anecdotes from participants as sufficient to assess the value of an in-house leadership development program, but with today’s challenging economy however, it is no longer business as usual. Learning &Development budgets are receiving more scrutiny than ever and many HR and talent management professionals are feeling the pressure to look for more solid evidence to justify the investment in their programmes.
The real solution
Is there really a way to effectively measure the return on investments (ROI) made on trainings? Can we ensure training success is expressed directly as a business contribution?
Organisations who have embraced learning and development best practices ensure their training programmes:
• are linked to business goals and performance
• are part of a business-wide strategy
• have tangible and obtainable objectives for the employees
• Focus on helping employees carry out existing tasks more efficiently or to a higher standard
• have varying learning styles embedded including classroom, self-learning, on-the-job, and coaching
• can train individuals to take on a different role – e.g. with increased responsibilities
• define who is responsible for planning, implementing and evaluating the training
A Success Story
In 2008, J.C. Penney a UK retailer, found itself among the bottom of all UK retailers in customer satisfaction with a rating of 43 percent. The organisation realised the need to engage and educate its 155,000 associates in 1,100 stores, logistics centers and headquarters to raise its customer satisfaction rating. This meant they had identified a tangible and obtainable objective – to improve customer satisfaction ratings.
The retailer then went ahead to train its associates through a multi-faceted approach (varying learning styles) that had distinct messages for each targeted population (store leaders, store associates and home office associates).
Though the retailer identified that key to the initiative’s success was the support from all levels of employees, they gave deliberate focus to store managers so that they could “champion” the message. All store associates then participated in learning sessions delivered by store managers and the training supervisor team–within three months of the store manager’s learning programme.
The result? Customer satisfaction ratings increased from 48 to 63 percent by the end of 2010, ranking J.C. Penney as top in customer service.1
The Way Forward
In the age of powerful computing at low costs, gaining expertise in business intelligence is about the fastest and easiest way to show return on investment on training and other forms of HR interventions. Intervention’s like that of J.C Penney’s can be easily viewed on dashboards that these software produce with a click of a button.
Do an online search for Business Intelligence software today and you might just be on your way to training cost vindication. However, for a more robust ROI calculation on your Learning and Development Programmes you just may need to engage renowned Learning and Development Consultants who would work with your team to deliver a bespoke intervention.
Bolaji Olagunju