If you’ve ever been involved in marketing, you’ll know how difficult it is to isolate any part of your strategy and state categorically that X resulted in Y number of enquiries or sales. It’s hard because, in all likelihood, many different elements in your strategy have been working together over time to build brand awareness and influence your customer’s perception, long before any buying decision is made.
In Learning and Development, traditional models for evaluating the return on investment share a similar problem.
Training doesn’t happen in a vacuum and there are probably dozens of initiatives, changes and projects that are claiming some, or all, of the benefits you believe are due to the vital work you’re doing to release and develop potential within the organisation.
Take, for example, improved customer satisfaction. It might very well be due to the training and development you’ve provided to employees on the front line, but it might just as easily have something to do with:
• A new product or service launch.
• A new marketing strategy or advertising campaign.
• Improvements in distribution.
• A reduction in errors in manufacturing or service delivery (perhaps due to a different learning intervention).
Or countless other small or large changes and service improvements happening elsewhere in the organisation.
And you can be sure, each of those areas is claiming it is.
Of course, the fact that all these things are happening are themselves evidence that the culture you helped build is supporting a strong learning culture and growth mindset, but that’s not helpful when people armed with calculators want two specific dots connected.
The problem is, whilst we’ll bend over backwards to demonstrate to those with the purse strings that cost X resulted in benefit Y, there’s potentially a lot of double counting going on when it comes to any improvement in business performance.
Is there a better way?
Possibly not one that will satisfy every accountant but, in practical terms, yes. The most powerful evidence of success in my experience is the stories people tell. Stories like the one contained in this message I received on LinkedIn 18 years after a training event I’d facilitated:
“You really won’t remember me [I did] but you trained me over 3/4 days how to interview, and assess in assessment centres, back when I worked at {Telecoms Company}. You taught me everything I know, and I’ve never forgotten how tough yet so rewarding the workshop was.”
Honestly, it’s stories like this that demonstrate to me that I’ve made a real difference to people. And if I wanted to prove that to others, I could go back and ask further questions about what exactly changed.
So, here’s a thought. Instead of trying to count beans that someone else is also counting, what could you do to capture and record real stories about the impact your training has had on behaviours, attitudes and beliefs? How might stories illustrate the real benefit you bring to people, teams and organisations?
Next month, I’ll build on this idea further and provide some tips that will help you ensure that your stories are evidence of changes that are real and tangible.
And I’ll show you how these could be more persuasive when it comes to securing the future investment in Learning and Development (and your Trainers’ Library®? membership). And we all know how important that investment in Learning and Development is, especially when, for example, the latest State of the Global Workforce report from Gallop, suggests employee engagement in the UK is amongst the lowest in the world at just 10%.
Until next time…