Chief Learning Officer - October 2008 - (Page 38)

IN PRACTICE ALIGNING MEASUREMENT TO BUSINESS SUCCESS I f the learning department relies solely on ﬁll-rate percentages and similar learning measurements when reporting to the executive team, shifting reporting focus to align with business-unit goals may seem like a tall order. The keys to speaking the language of the C-suite are understanding its needs, building a system to meet those needs and effectively translating learning results into business metrics. Business-unit managers and executives aren’t impressed with how many employees were trained or how many classrooms were ﬁlled. Here are six tips for aligning learning measurements with business success: 1. Track macro trends, not individual results. In sales and other functions, too many variables exist to measure positive or negative impacts of training on an individual success/failure level. However, comparisons of regional teams, city teams or other groups can help identify a correlation between training and success. 2. Measure and report the right metrics. Keep in mind there are only three reasons for companies to have a training function: • Drive up enterprise revenues. • Increase employee productivity. • Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. If metrics do not show that kind of impact, they are likely the wrong metrics to show executives. 3. Look at the training strategies used by successful people or teams. What training products or practices — formal or informal — are role models in the organization using? What are successful people or teams doing differently than their counterparts? Can their training practices be partially or completely replicated for other people or groups? 4. Create a teaching culture. An organization that believes in recognizing and rewarding the best people for sharing how they achieve, what they know, how they learn and where they ﬁnd information will grow faster and make fewer mistakes than one that does not. An enterprise does not need one best sales person; it needs dozens or hundreds or thousands who understand they are not competing against each other but, rather, against another company. Empowering peers is the real winning strategy. 5. Decentralize content creation. Create tools and processes that make it easy for everyone who is an expert to share knowledge with anyone who is not. Peer-topeer teaching tools mean giving up some control of the content creation process but increase the accessibility and speed that content can be updated or corrected. 6. Centralize content deployment. The best content on the planet is worthless if employees cannot ﬁnd it when they need it. All decentralized content needs a structure with a single entry point, both for ease of use and to allow aggregation of data from multiple sources for tracking. Information will have the most impact if it can be accessed through one search capability, allowing learners access to information where they need it — not at the beginning of a book, white paper or video, but at the page with the answer they need. Improving your learning measurement system is not simply about proving learning’s worth to the C-suite. By altering the view of measurement, learning leaders reap the additional beneﬁt of improving the learning organization by creating an evolving, organic culture that’s open to growth and change. CLO Tom Kelly has more than 25 years of experience in the education and training industry and has held positions at NetApp, Cisco, Oracle Corp., Sun Microsystems, NeXT Corp. and Control Data Corp. He is co-author of The Business Case for E-Learning. He can be reached at editor@clomedia.com. According to Forrester, a variety of tools now available have the capacity to measure informal learning, such as video on-demand deployment tools, “audio over slides” presentations, on-demand webinars, searchable white papers, wikis, blogs, communities of practices infrastructure and much more. These tools allow learning leaders to retrieve metrics that measure the information that is being accessed. They also allow training and development professionals to determine who is accessing the information via numbers of downloads, page views and other resources. Deliver Data to the C-Suite Training professionals are well-attuned to the education needs of their primary customers — the organization’s learners — but sometimes have difﬁculty reading the minds and needs of their other customers — the executive team. Tom Kelly, a learning leader with more than 25 years of experience in the education and training industry who has held positions at NetApp, Cisco and Oracle, has spent a good deal of his career ﬁguring out which data is important to management and developing creative methods to mine that data. “Most of our training metrics are ‘busyness metrics,’ not ‘business metrics,’” Kelly explained. “They demonstrate how busy we are, not how much real impact we have on the success of the enterprise that employs us.” Several years ago, when Kelly faced the reality that his learning organization was measuring and reporting metrics that were not a great value to the C-suite, his team looked to another organizational group as a potential source of data. As an alternative resource for reporting facts and ﬁgures, Kelly’s learning organization enlisted the efforts of its own trainees, the company’s sales department, to bulk up reports. In a joint effort with the sales team, learning was able to demonstrate that, in one training instance — 30 days after most of the targeted sales force completed a training program — the company’s sales numbers shot up. In studies that followed, the two departments demonstrated a similar phenomenon three times across three different product or technology launches. Never again did Kelly’s training staff have 38

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

Chief Learning Officer - October 2008 Editor’s Letter Connections Business Impact Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial How Fast Is Your ‘B’ Team? Hampton Hotels CLO Profile Save the World, Make a Buck: Seven Ideas From the Nonprofit Sector Developing Leaders at Amnesty International Learning Measurements: It’s Time to Align Aligning Measurement to Business Success Training Employees With Special Needs How to Reach Disabled Learners Hands Off: Facilitating Informal Learning Who Owns Informal Learning? Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - October 2008

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