We have all heard phrases like “measure what matters” or “what gets measured is what gets done.” What if you are not sure what matters? What if you are doing and doing and can’t tell if it is really creating sustainable change or adding sustainable value?
Creating business value requires a focus on understanding the key business drivers that your organization is trying to achieve. Many learning and development organizations get caught up in focusing on easy-to-see measures like the number of people trained. Or, they try to do formal ROIs and find themselves battling to accept how much training affected the situation. I’ve discovered a relatively easy to use formula that allows you see what matters, and how to measure it in a way that also resonates with stakeholders.
Every time you talk with someone who has a training need, make sure that you don’t leave the conversation until they have answered what they want to see two or three months after the training session that looks different from the current situation. Too often, we ask using non-business terms. We may say, “How do you want to measure success,” and accept a response like “if we have 90 percent of the audience participating,” or “if they pass a quiz that shows they understood the content!”
Neither of those things show any success from the training. You want to ask the question by having them paint you a picture of what they imagine the future looks like that is different from today — what behaviors they are seeing, what language is being used, what business result is occurring. Once you have that information and only when you have that information, design a learning solution that matches it.
Use the methodology that works in your culture and, of course, build it using formal, informal and peer components to meet the diverse experiences of your learners. Use the description to identify the absolute necessities — if they say that they want higher sales revenue, ask what is preventing the sales revenue? Take them through the whole process — are we choosing the wrong customers, are we choosing the wrong decision maker inside a customer, are we presenting the wrong solution, are we giving up on the sale? Then design a learning opportunity that will allow people to close the gap and achieve the desired result.
Next, try the learning solution. Before it is too solid or too fixed, start using it. If possible, do it when the content is about 60 to 70 percent complete so that you might have leading indicators of effectiveness and can modify the content or approach. Be prepared to go live with a minimum viable product, and ensure that your stakeholders agree with using a minimum viable product to gather data for effectiveness.
And don’t stop here! As you gather data, as you prove or disprove hypotheses, make sure you communicate, communicate, communicate. Refine your storyline. Tell it over and over until you hear others telling the story as well. This is how you market your ability to solve business problems to close performance gaps.
Again, don’t stop. Move on to use this knowledge to measure the impact of continuous learning on your organization. People who are learning are growing, innovating and sustainably participating in your organization. Continuous learning prevents burnout, recharges batteries and increases engagement. It also builds a knowledge base within your organization that leads to higher performance. When you multiply the tangible benefits of greater target achievement with the intangible benefits of psychological safety, your company begins to create sustainable performance improvements through every employee.
In a recent study done by Fuse Universal, engagement with learning twice a week increased customer satisfaction scores by 10 percent and first time call resolution by 6 percent — tangible performance improvements without requiring training on specific topics. This is evidence of the impact of continuous learning on the bottom line. In an internal study done by Hilti, line managers who attended any training programs had team members who both proactively pulled knowledge from our digital learning platform and over-achieved targets compared to peers whose line managers did not attend training.
In your organization, how do you measure tangible and intangible benefits? Where can you gather data? Can you gather data on achievement of individual or team targets? Can you gather data on activity on your digital learning platform, attendance to internal or external courses or even self-reported learning activities? Can you sort data by tenure, role or level in the organization? Go to these sources and pull data. I recommend to start with a few hypotheses such as:
- Team leaders who attend trainings achieve higher engagement scores.
- Team members of team leaders who attend training achieve higher percentage of their personal targets.
- Team members who attend role specific training are promoted at a higher rate than team members who attend generic training.
- Team members who self-report external training stay at the company for twice as long as team members who do not attend any training, internal or external.
The specific hypotheses should reflect your organization’s goals related to attrition, promotion, engagement, target achievement or other metrics that are reflected in your corporate strategy. Try to only put two variables together — prove or disprove that hypothesis and then you can add another variable.
Once you start seeing any trends, begin reporting on them. Don’t wait to define a full dashboard. Don’t try to get your data 100 percent accurate. Start talking about what you are seeing and start encouraging others to use the insights in their own work. For example, you may be looking at data related to team leaders and their teams’ engagement scores and notice that team leaders with less than five years of tenure have higher engagement scores. Report on this, and get others working to hypothesize about this.
It does not mean that you should fire all managers with more than five years of tenure, it means your organization needs to understand what you are doing at five years of tenure that affects people in a way that reduces engagement. Perhaps this is the time when they have attended all of the relevant training and they become disillusioned or feel they are not developing. Your goal now would be to get to the root cause and create a performance solution (this may or may not be a learning solution depending on what is causing the lack of performance). Communicate the trends to stakeholders, management team members, your own team and begin modifying approaches. L&D is really like applying design thinking to people — always being willing to build a prototype, test it and refine it or trash it depending on the test results.
To summarize, begin by ensuring that you are able to add business value. Do this by designing solutions specific to the known business problem to achieve relevance through adding value. Build credibility through these successes and expand your network and business acumen. Use the expanding business knowledge to begin gathering information about leading and lagging indicators of business success. Build some hypotheses and start determining where to find data related to your hypotheses.
More than looking at data points, look for trends across the data and communicate these trends to build upon them. It’s critical to talk about your findings and communicate what you are seeing. By continuing to drive business value, you can help others stop looking at data that does not truly matter in favor of data that directly affects the organization’s goals.
