How To Measure The Value Of Learning And Development Teams
Put the issue of ROI (Return On Investment) to one side for a moment. Now think about value; the value your Learning and Development team brings to your business. If you are not used to looking at ROI or value as a Learning and Development team, the thought of doing so will seem daunting. ROI is particularly difficult to measure for Learning and Development, because of the many variables at play. Many forward-thinking senior executives will understand that.
Value, on the other hand, is something that the entire business will understand, as various roles will acknowledge the purpose that departments have in contributing to the overall success of organizational goals. The only problem for Learning and Development is that, historically, it has articulated its value through efficiency. By reporting back on inputs, the Learning and Development department have inevitably created outdated benchmarks to measure themselves against and find themselves on the backfoot in a long, tedious struggle.
In order to avoid being seen as “the department that cuts costs”, today's Learning and Development teams need to demonstrate value to the business, which, as our research has shown, is a challenge in itself.
Learning And Development 's Challenges in Aligning Learning to Business
The top challenges according to our research around aligning Learning and Development activity to the business reflect the following:
- Leaders are not involved in learning strategy decisions.
- The Learning and Development team does not understand the business priorities.
- The Learning and Development team struggles to demonstrate business value.
- The learning and talent strategy is out of sync with the business strategy.
- Staff don't understand how their learning contributes to the business.
Business alignment is a key part of demonstrating value. So how do you go about being better aligned? We've already talked about 7 habits of highly aligned Learning and Development teams, but what if, as a team, you don’t have any evidence to show how well aligned you are to business activity and organizational goals?
12 Valuable Metrics for Learning And Development Teams
Over the last three years, we have analyzed our data to look at the bottom-line impact of learning interventions on their organizations. From this, we have identified these 12 “external” areas of evidence you can look at in order to help prove the value of your Learning and Development strategy.
Talent.
- Attrition rates.
- Engagement levels.
- Productivity levels.
- Time to competency.
Market share.
- Customer satisfaction.
- Revenue growth.
Products and services.
- Time to delivery of new products and services.
- Time to roll-out of new IT applications.
Efficiency in training.
- Cost reduction.
- Study time.
- Volume.
- Delivery time.
Added to that, consider asking your people how they like to learn and what they need to know; then feed this information to business leaders. Towards Maturity can do this for you, producing a personalized report that can help you understand more comprehensively how your staff learn, both formally and informally, to inform the learning strategy.
As you can see, there are plenty of opportunities for Learning and Development teams to capture and track evidence on how they create value, which empowers Learning and Development leaders to challenge the business status quo. It’s time to start using the evidence at your fingertips to open up new conversations with business leaders and demonstrate value.
The Towards Maturity Benchmark™
The Towards Maturity Benchmark is a performance improvement tool that helps Learning and Development professionals reflect on the effectiveness of their strategies, comparing them to top performing learning organizations around the globe, and providing personalized results. Benchmark to get valuable feedback that will help you improve your Learning and Development strategy and demonstrate value to your organization.
