Why It’s Time to Measure the ROI of Employee Training

Most organisations measure training in some sort of way

They likely know who attended, who completed the e-learning, who filled in the feedback form. We might even know that 94% of people would recommend the session to a colleague.

Lovely. But did anyone actually do anything differently afterwards?

That is a much harder question to answer. And, increasingly, it is the one L&D teams need to be able to answer.

Training budgets are under scrutiny. Leaders want to understand what they are getting for their investment. Employees have less time to spend away from the day job. And if you are asking hundreds, or thousands, of people to take part in a development programme, "they seemed to enjoy it" is probably not going to carry the whole business case.

So how do you measure whether training actually worked?

The problem with measuring what is easy

There is a reason so much training evaluation stops with attendance and feedback and that is because they are easy to measure.

At the end of a workshop, you send out a survey and ask people what they thought.

Was the facilitator engaging? Was the content useful? Would you recommend it?

These questions are worth asking. If everyone hated the learning experience, that is fairly useful information. Enjoyment though is not the same as impact.

Someone can love a workshop and change absolutely nothing afterwards. They can also find a session uncomfortable, difficult or challenging and walk away having learned something genuinely useful.

That is where training evaluation starts to get more interesting.

What should training evaluation actually measure?

One of the best-known ways of thinking about this is the Kirkpatrick Model, which looks at evaluation across four levels.

Reaction asks how people responded to the learning.

Learning asks whether they actually gained knowledge or skills.

Behaviour asks whether they started doing something differently back at work.

And results looks at whether those changes contributed to a wider organisational outcome.

The further down that list you go, the more useful the information becomes. Unfortunately, it also becomes harder to collect.

Which is probably why so many organisations remain very well informed about whether everybody liked the biscuits.

Why measuring business results gets complicated

In theory, the final level sounds perfect.

You run a training programme, business performance improves, you calculate the return. Everyone is happy.

Reality tends to be less cooperative and straightforward.

Imagine you run sales training and revenue increases six months later. Was that the training?

Quite possibly because with the lack of clear statistics, you might assume that one caused the other.

But perhaps the market improved. A competitor disappeared. The product changed. Marketing launched a brilliant campaign. Sales targets were adjusted. A new incentive scheme appeared.

Or maybe all of those things happened at once.

This is the problem with trying to draw a perfectly straight line between learning and business performance. There are usually quite a few other people standing on the line.

That does not mean you should ignore business results. Far from it. It means we need to be careful about claiming that training caused something when dozens of other factors were involved.

Behaviour is often where things become useful

For a lot of professional skills, leadership and management development, I think behaviour gives us a particularly useful place to focus.

Take feedback training. Before the programme, perhaps managers avoid difficult conversations, soften the message so much that nobody understands it, or wait until the annual review to mention something that happened in February.

Afterwards, what would success look like?

Maybe they address issues earlier. Maybe their feedback becomes clearer. Maybe they ask better questions rather than immediately jumping in with an answer.

Those things are observable, and if you have identified the right behaviours before the programme begins, you can look for change afterwards.

That gives you something much more meaningful than:

"87% of participants rated the workshop excellent."

Good to know. But I'd rather know what the other 87% are doing differently on Monday morning.

Start measuring before the training starts

This is the bit that makes a lot of evaluation unnecessarily difficult. Organisations decide they want to measure impact once the programme has already happened. By then, you have missed half the picture.

If you want to know whether behaviour changed, you need some idea of what was happening before the learning. So start there.

Ask what somebody should be doing differently if the programme succeeds. Make it specific enough that you could actually recognise it.

"Be a better leader" is not especially helpful.

"Delegates decisions appropriately rather than solving every problem themselves" is much better.

Then create a baseline. You might use self-assessment, manager observation, colleague feedback, interviews or another measurement method that suits the programme.

Run the learning. Then look again.

What changed?

You do not need to measure everything

This is where evaluation can get slightly carried away. Once you start thinking about measurement, it is tempting to build the mother of all dashboards.

Every learner.

Every behaviour.

Every module.

Every imaginable business metric.

At which point evaluating the programme becomes almost as expensive as delivering it. You probably do not need that. The level of evaluation should match the importance of the programme and what you are trying to achieve.

If you are delivering a short knowledge update, checking whether people understood it might be perfectly sensible. If you are investing heavily in a global leadership programme designed to change how managers behave, completion rates are clearly not enough.

Different learning needs different evidence.

ROI starts with knowing what success looks like

There is also a wider benefit to defining the behaviours you want to measure. It improves the training itself. If we know exactly what people should be doing differently afterwards, we can design around that. The examples become more relevant. The practice becomes more realistic. Managers know what they should be reinforcing. And evaluation stops being something we bolt onto the end because someone remembered to ask for a report.

It becomes part of the learning journey. That is a much healthier way to think about ROI.

Not:

Can we prove this workshop made us £473,621?

But:

What did we need people to do differently, did they actually do it, and did that change contribute to something the organisation cares about?

That is a question worth answering.

Because training can feel valuable. It can be enjoyable. It can be beautifully designed and brilliantly facilitated.

But if nothing changes afterwards... We should probably want to know.

About Excel Communications     

Excel Communications is a learning and development consultancy based near London in the U.K. For more than 30 years; we have been collaborating with clients across the globe.  

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We work with you to create unforgettably, customised learning experiences to achieve your vision of success and growth, with tangible results.   

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