Chief Learning Officer - February 2008 - (Page 43)

productivity “Metrics and statistics are essential, but anecdotal information can often complement them. As with so many things in life, it depends on the situation.” – Questionmark CEO Eric Shepherd When Is Anecdotal Evidence Appropriate? To keep the respect of stakeholders, CLOs need the hard numbers to justify their ongoing initiatives, particularly when their actions involve spending real dollars. If that money is from another unit’s budget and that unit is willing to allocate their funds to close the feedback loop, then your professional credibility is less on the line. But you’ll do your stakeholders a favor by asking for proof in addition to their off-the-cuff opinions. The proof you’re looking for doesn’t have to come from a fullblown return on investment (ROI) analysis. But when you receive the type of feedback about a learning intervention that will require an investment to rectify it, it is smart to quantify with your stakeholder the financial and other costs of different options to make the changes indicated by the feedback. Words alone can’t prove the efficiency or effectiveness of what learning does. Words don’t equal impact, numbers do. But words will act as an index to point you toward quantifiable data that either indicates impact or justifies the actions to seek improvement. To get ahead of the feedback, you need to know what success looks like in terms of the metrics and targets for any given initiative. Sketch it out in terms of a scorecard. What metrics will determine our success? Where are they now, and where do they need to be? What actions need to be taken if the metrics go up, go down or remain unchanged? Your stakeholders should know, in terms of measurable gains, what a successful training experience is expected to bring. If not, your role is to help them define the criteria that you’ll measure together to determine the success of your partnership. Think in terms of what learning can do to enable successful business outcomes. With customer service training, a scorecard might include measures that enable first-time call resolution, total duration to resolve service calls, time to competence for new hires and so on. Quantify what success looks like for each measure, and decide what actions to take when the learning program is and isn’t meeting expectations. Using data from your customer service tracking tool or other data repository, you and your stakeholders can correlate the learning enablement measures against the real business measures to see how a learning intervention is impacting performance and immediately proceed with any needed corrective actions. Balancing Metrics With Anecdotal Feedback Questionmark CEO Eric Shepherd, who is a leading authority on assessment software, said, “Metrics and statistics are essential, but anecdotal information can often complement them. As with so many things in life, it depends on the situation. When you are measuring opinions, anecdotal evidence is extremely valuable. But if you are measuring knowledge and skills, it can in some cases be less helpful and possibly distracting. Collecting open-ended responses for feedback surveys and training evaluations makes them more actionable when you see an issue with the numerical representation of people’s thoughts and feelings.” Never forget that learning is a service organization dedicated to the success of the business units that it serves. So, if line management says they didn’t like your training after it’s been rolled out, not only is that very valuable feedback, it demands a response to show management that you understand their concerns and what you’re going to do differently next time to get it right. But you also need to monitor the success metrics. You shouldn’t turn full circle on anecdotal feedback unless the success metrics you defined also turn in the wrong direction. There needs to be a balance between the two, where one can validate the other. In this case, one plus one will equal three. In some cases, measurement just isn’t possible or available, but I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 43 February 2008 http://www.clomedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - February 2008

Chief Learning Officer - February 2008 Editor's Letter Table of Contents Business Impact Trends Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial Learning Solutions Home Depot: Building Better Associates CLO Profile Environment Realizing the Vision of “One Philips” Tactics Sun Microsystems’ Next-Generation Worker Video Game Recruiting Tool Productivity The Regence Group: Blended Measurement Human Capital NASA: A Case Study in Technical Leadership Development Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers' Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - February 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.