Chief Learning Officer - February 2008 - (Page 45)

productivity audience that can lead to improving the learning experience. But electronic forms in general tend to distance the personal connection between learner and learning organization. And it becomes even harder to connect the dots on anecdotal feedback when surveys are outsourced to external organizations. Written feedback is different than spoken feedback, as it often loses context in the translation. Just think about how an e-mail “flame” gets started. A person writes what they think is a reasonable and clear message to someone, and the recipient takes it completely out of context. Meanwhile, the recipient steams over it, writes a hot response and fires it back across the bow of the original author. And back and forth it goes. In the old days, organizations could achieve a 95 percent response rate on feedback surveys (i.e., Kirkpatrick’s Level 1) by handing out hard copies at the end of class, then collecting and scanning the results into their tracking system. Today, response rates to online end-of-course surveys usually hover between 30 percent and 40 percent, and many organizations just aren’t that concerned about it. Some practitioners state that they really don’t look at the survey results for mature courses anyway. Yet, feedback surveys are necessary early on in the life of a program. Admittedly, once a program is mature and running smoothly for a number of years, they do become less valuable. time to investigate the issue. If you’re receiving a lot of one-off comments about a particular program, then it’s likely that something isn’t clear with the content message. And too often people identify a problem without offering a solution. The manner in which you ask for feedback can help resolve this. Asking “What do you suggest as a better way to do this?” or “How would you do it differently?” forces one to think beyond his complaint to possible solutions to his perceived issue. Some proposed solutions could be just what’s needed. At any rate, asking people for their ideas requires more careful thought on an issue, usually giving the individual a fuller appreciation of it and why it was handled as it was in the first place. Be Proactive, Not Reactive Going back to our opening scenario, it’s easier to validate feedback with hard data when you have a measurement strategy in place. Your measurement strategy identifies your key measures of success for the learning organization and for specific stakeholder initiatives. Anecdotal feedback is a crucial part of improving learning and driving impact. But be prepared to know where it came from, validate it and act on it. A well-planned and implemented measurement strategy — one that involves anecdotal evidence — could save you some embarrassing moments in your leadership and earn you a permanent seat at the table. Is All Feedback Good Feedback? You might say that some feedback is better than no feedback, but is all feedback good? Not necessarily. It takes virtually no ability to simply criticize, although at times it seems like some people have earned an advanced degree in it. There will almost always be some complainers, and if your stakeholders agree with you as to the role these people are yet again playing, the complainers’ comments can be acknowledged, but politely ignored. Feedback also can be biased, reflecting one’s own opinion as a result of some unique scenario that forms the exception, not the rule. Anecdotal feedback as a whole is unscientific. But just as you aggregate Likert results and look for trends, you can look for trends and patterns in your anecdotal feedback. If multiple employees are giving the same feedback, then it’s http://www.thetrainingassociates.com http://www.thetrainingassociates.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

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