Read Carol\'s article. Discuss how you determine whether your training program i
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Question
Read Carol's article. Discuss how you determine whether your training program is linked to the business results. Write 1 or 2 pages, or write as much as you can.
Measuring What Matters Most in Your Training BY CAROL LEAMAN
A four-step process that determines whether training is linked to business results.
For years organizations have been drowning in meaningless data: Who at- tended training? Who completed training? Survey feedback and test scores. Training hours completed and training cost per hour. Think about it: Do these metrics define how training helps improve business performance? Do they help improve individual employee performance? Not even close.
Meaningless metrics get in the way of what organizations really need: analyt- ics that prove learning programs have a direct, measurable impact on the business bottom line. It’s time to do away with check-the-box data that doesn’t really mat- ter and instead use business impact-driven learning.
What it is
Effectively managing your learning programs in the modern workplace means taking a leaner, more streamlined, and bottom-line approach. It starts with clearly identifying the end goal of training—specifically, how well employees are applying their knowledge to the job and achieving target job outcomes as a re- sult. Let’s call this business impact-driven learning.
If you’re using a business impact-driven learning approach, you’re essentially stripping out “just-in-case” learning and focusing only on the learning that em- ployees need to achieve business objectives.
How it works
Business impact-driven learning involves four steps:
1. Identify the job performance outcomes or results you expect from your employees.
Define how they will achieve those results—key behaviors employees must exhibit continually to affect the business.
Design a learning program to teach employees the knowledge they need to perform these ideal behaviors.
Collect the right data to actively track behaviors and measure outcomes;
identify deficits that are affecting performance; and design and adjust training in real time to ensure that employees consistently have the knowl- edge needed to perform to their potential.
Guidelines
Here’s how business impact-driven learning plays out in a real-life scenario in the food service industry.
1. Start with the end result you want to achieve: business outcomes and per- formance objectives. Everything that happens in an organization results from someone putting knowledge into action. Employee behavior is the critical ele- ment here: What employees know directly affects what they do, and what they do either supports or hinders business performance.
Let’s use an example of a fictitious coffee shop chain. The overall goal might be to increase revenue by $10 million a year. To achieve that result, each associate at each location needs to sell 10 percent more product. Defining those overall objectives is relatively easy. The next step is where it starts to get tricky. How an associate sells 10 percent more product is where behavior comes in.
2. Define behaviors associated with performance objectives. For employees to achieve objectives, they must be able to perform the appropriate behaviors or actions consistently and properly over time. To sell 10 percent more product, ideal associate behaviors might include:
appropriately greeting customers with a friendly and helpful tone effectively articulating key product features using current promotions to upsell moving the customer through the selling process by placing prod- ucts on the counter next to the cash register.
It’s easy to imagine how each of the above behaviors, if performed con- sistently across all associates, could exponentially contribute to better sales. How many times have you been asked
if you’d like a pastry with your coffee? Even if this upsell ask only works one in 10 times, achieving an extra 10 percent in sales is not that much of a stretch. 3. Design a microlearning training pro- gram to teach desired behaviors. Now that you’ve articulated overall business goals and specific individual employee targets, and identified the core set of behaviors that you believe will achieve those goals, it’s time to figure out what knowledge each employee needs.
Microlearning is the optimal way to equip employees with specific knowledge to perform each behavior associated with achieving the end goal of selling 10 percent more product.
In our food service example, a micro- learning module to teach associates how to upsell a pastry could include:
specific words or phrases to in- corporate in the upsell
body language to exhibit (for ex- ample, look customers in the eye, smile, point to the pastry)
product attributes to highlight (for example, organic ingredients,
gluten-free, made fresh daily
on-site)
• a video that depicts an ideal upsell
scenario.
4. Track behaviors, measure results, and adjust if necessary. Once you’ve identified the most important ideal behaviors and provided training, the next step involves understanding whether employees are actually per- forming these behaviors properly. In other words, are they putting knowl- edge into action?
Tracking behaviors is often the place where the entire system falls down. But this link in the chain is es- sential for correlating knowledge to action and then to business results. Let’s go back to our example.
Let’s say a store manager was re- quired to observe how many times, over a period of a week, an associ-
ate asked about that pastry: Across 100 customer interactions, was it 100 times? Ninety? Twenty? Now, what if the same data were recorded for three associates or five associates? What if the manager skipped a week and did the same thing again?
Additionally, what if the store man- ager went even deeper and tracked whether the associate was using proper verbiage, exhibiting the right body language, and highlighting the correct product attributes as part of the upsell? By examining the behav- ior more in-depth, the manager could pinpoint exactly where an associate might need extra guidance to achieve defined objectives.
Recording behavior observations isn’t trivial. It takes work. But being thoughtful about the behaviors and diligent about recording observations allows you to link behaviors to de- fined business outcomes. If the result isn’t what you expected, the behav- ior probably needs rethinking or the learning content needs adjusting.
It’s a constant loop. If growth in sales is not being achieved, it’s time to take a harder look at what employees need to do, whether they are perform- ing the required actions, and what knowledge they need to consistently perform correctly. It’s about being fo- cused, measurable, and impactful.
Results
To truly take a business impact-driven learning approach, talent develop- ment leaders need to concentrate first on identifying specific business ob- jectives. When this happens, they can work backward to ensure all learning aligns with the ultimate goal and track the impact of that learning over time. This approach eliminates the irrel- evant information that typically gets recorded and replaces it with learning measures that tie directly to business results. The outcome is leaner, less costly training that focuses on driving behaviors that make the most sense to the business.
Explanation / Answer
Carol, herself, has had a top notch career working in the technology house for a quantity of years. That you could study more about her in this satisfactory interview called Why this lady turned down a terrifi job at Google. You could additionally verify out a exciting case gain knowledge of of how the Axonify platform is being used at Bloomingdales.. Now here are the highlights from our conversation.
Kapp: Carol, can you please give an explanation for somewhat about what Axonify does and the way it obtained began?
Leaman: Axonify obtained its begin out of a need on the operations part of the business at Pep Boys. Their buddies weren't retaining and applying their company security and loss prevention ideas and it used to be costing them some huge cash. Their LMS and attention packages really with no trouble weren't ready to alter conduct and there was nothing they felt was available to aid clear up this obstacle. We worked with Pep Boys to create the sector first microlearning platform (before microlearning was even a term) and the outcome were so exceptional with savings within the millions of bucks a 12 months that we took the solution out to market and the rest, as they are saying, is history.
Following our first deployment at Pep Boys over 4 years in the past, Axonify has endured to innovate and broaden our resolution offering and that i'm excited to share that we've just launched the sectors first employee advantage Platform. It'1s a platform that focuses utterly on driving worker abilities in corporate manufacturer, making sure that each employee has what they want, either of their heads or at their fingertips, to quite simply do their job.
Kapp: Wow, so you're within the method of leaving behind the eLearning category, thats large information. Are you able to provide an explanation for what you mean by means of that and why one of these daring move?
Leaman: There are 2 fundamental factors why we made the aware decision to depart the eLearning class in the back of.
First, the Axonify platform has expanded good past eLearning.
What started out as an extraordinarily potent microlearning platform has now evolved into a sophisticated multi-faceted platform that provides corporations with the whole thing they need to make certain that their workers collect, develop, sustain, share and observe their competencies to the job. The platform is a hundred% committed to solving the employee advantage drawback in a technique that's fun, speedy, personalized and on the point of want.
The 2nd, and extra predominant cause, is that the majority of our buyers rather with no trouble don't see us as an eLearning platform.
Greater than 1/2 of the members who purchase and enforce Axonify are within the trade unit and now not part of a learning group. They leverage Axonify to improve employee efficiency and eventually make a industry impact. These individuals have not ever seen us as an eLearning platform, but rather so that you could give a boost to employee talents, pressure behavior trade and aid them meet their bottom-line ambitions. Whether or not it's the VP of Logistics at Walmart watching to lessen safety incidents, the VP of hazard at John Hancock or the chief of supplier enablement at Toyota, they're all utilising Axonify for one factor and that's to support their persons to do the correct factor. ELearning options simply don't supply on that promise. With that being mentioned, we also have finding out leaders who've bought Axonify, and also have a technique to demonstrate a distinctive contribution to the business.
Kapp: can you tell me more about your employee expertise Platform?
Leaman: The Axonify employee competencies platform consists of 5 interconnected and interdependent components: microLearning + potential-on-demand + management aid + conduct commentary & measurement + trade outcome tracking & measurement, each and every with their possess certain set of capabilities.
Kapp: interesting, what hindrance are you solving with this new platform?
Leaman: relatively easily, Axonify solves the corporate employee abilities situation.
More than ever before, workers are overwhelmed with what they ought to comprehend to do their jobs. For this reason, they aren't doing the right thing, which is collectively rolling as much as a very expensive predicament for businesses. To try to solve this hindrance, businesses have thrown ordinary eLearning and training practices at it, along with convoluted wiki-form portals, none of which were strong. The intent is modest all procedures are considering offering learning, no longer on the acquisition, retention and software of capabilities. The influence? Low participation, terrible learning retention, lack of advantage development, no conduct change and no backside-line affect for the group.
Kapp: What are the important thing elements of the platform?
Leaman: critical to the platform is our award-winning microlearning ability, which gives you quick, day-to-day bursts of studying that adapt to what the worker knows and doesn't know. Alongside microlearning is our efficiency support providing that presents competencies-on-demand, the place employees can access the expertise they need, when they need it. Pulled from a residing repository of understanding that's populated via subject subject authorities and crowd-sourced by means of the employee community, Axonifys potential-on-demand resolution builds a bridge between authorities, learning professionals and staff.
Also, we haven't forgotten concerning the value of managers within the worker capabilities equation and hence, provide them with a complete toolset within the platform to aid them coach and help employees progress.
And last but no longer least, is the most powerful a part of the supplying our trade impact capabilities. With the launch of this platform, were providing our customers with the particular potential to detect, track and measure behaviors via to business outcome. For the primary time ever, companies can measure the influence of their learning efforts on knowledge development by means of to employee behaviors and business results, whether or not it's an develop in earnings or a discount in safety incidents.
Kapp: are you able to develop on the microlearning factor of your platform? What makes it exact?
Leaman: As I recounted, Axonify used to be the primary organization to deliver microlearning to market earlier than a category was even developed so wee been capable to ultimate the process to pressure unheard of voluntary participation, capabilities growth and outcome.
Chiefly, our microlearning resolution supplies customized, bite-sized content material briefly bursts, a few occasions per week, or even daily. Centered on the present day in mind science study and wrapped in gamification, staff follow their possess unique competencies course that adapts and expands as their degree of comprehension grows. During the expertise, they are able to play a sport, accumulate aspects, or compete with their peers, which makes the expertise enticing and enjoyable.
What makes it certain and robust is the patent pending Axonify finding out model, which is the excellent blend of brain science, adaptive finding out technology and gamification. Our adaptive, spacing algorithm has been optimized to maximise expertise progress and retention.
Kapp: can you give an explanation for somewhat how you leverage game mechanics to power worker engagement, talents and behavior exchange?
Carol: The Axonify platform employs about 15 sport mechanics that work collectively to force participation and outcome. For illustration, staff can opt for to take their finding out from inside sport play, whether or not its a brain sport or an arcade variety game, we've dozens to decide on from. Other game mechanics incorporate coaches, leaderboards, rewards, information feed, badging and more.
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