A task that is only partially completed is not satisfying. It’s hard to know whether you’ve accomplished what you originally set out to do unless you can demonstrate the results of your efforts.
Learning and development (L&D) leaders have historically needed help articulating how our training programs have impacted the business. The favorable tidings? One can gauge success in a particular way. You can demonstrate how you’re raising staff performance by changing your perspective, posing the appropriate questions, and making use of the appropriate learning platform.
This post will discuss the importance of adopting a performance-driven L&D mindset, how to evaluate performance discrepancies between expectations and reality, and why it’s critical to use employee KPIs and analytics tools in your learning management system (LMS).
Let’s begin with the change in strategy that greatly simplifies the impact measurement process.
1. Adopt a Performance-Oriented Approach to L&D.
The first challenge is changing the emphasis from just providing formal training when requested to address the elements that affect performance across the entire organization.
Measuring and reporting success to stakeholders will be much easier for a learning and development function that focuses on how L&D can help boost business KPIs rather than just fulfilling employee training requests. This entails going beyond what employees may have learned in an eLearning course and concentrating on how L&D can improve employees’ performance and expedite business operations.
The first step in the shift is to identify the persistent issues or pain points that are impeding employees’ ability to perform well and complete their work.
2. Determine the Cause of the Issue Right Away.
Addressing the issues or pain points costing the business money, time, and valuable personnel is essential to demonstrating the value of training.
Earlier rather than later, you should be aware of the following four common pain points:
- Team members who are depleting their finances and not performing up to par.
- The tenure level, department, or organization with the highest attrition rate.
- The high number of new hires is a result of undersupporting internal candidates.
- New managers have an impact on retention or output.
You do the problem solving important issues in the organizations by posing these kinds of questions. A sales team that fails to meet goals could pose a major impact on business objectives, which is an example of a business problem. Focusing on the issue at hand will help you tackle this business challenge.
3. Examine the Performance Gap.
After confirming the issue, you must collect your data and verify the expectations of the people in charge of the impacted performance.
You can comprehend the demands and challenges of the role by interacting with those who are in charge of the work. Asking the right questions will reveal to you what needs to be improved and how the work is currently done. We call this an analysis of performance gaps.
You can start your gap analysis by asking questions such as these:
- What KPIs apply to individuals who find it difficult to complete the task?
- What goals do they not accomplish in their daily work routine?
- What impact does this failure have on business KPIs and performance?
By responding to questions such as these, you can collect the necessary information and determine which individuals or groups require more training in order to perform better. Creating learning objectives that make sense for the learners will also be aided by your performance gap analysis.
4. Work Together with the Subject Matter Expert to Develop Outstanding Learning Experience.
The top performers in your company should be identified by your performance gap analysis. Returning to our sales example, these could be salespeople who routinely surpass their quota.
In a perfect world, these individuals or employees would develop into subject matter experts (SMEs), imparting knowledge to the team as a whole to boost output. We are aware that SMEs are among the most in-demand employees in the company. So how do you get their favor?
Once more, the data from the gap analysis collected in the previous step is crucial to this process because it shows how your cooperation will address important organizational problems. Your internal experts are more likely to offer their time and assistance if you do this.
To save SMEs valuable time, make sure the process is streamlined as soon as they consent to participate. The collaboration will function as smoothly as possible with an LMS that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and L&D-controlled prompts to empower and expedite course creation.
5. Make Use of the Analytics in Your LMS.
You have now implemented targeted and deliberate learning interventions to assist in resolving issues after identifying the problem and gathering the baseline data.
Now, using performance change analysis, demonstrate how your learning solutions are making a difference and improving performance. Has the sales team’s performance in meeting quotas, for instance, improved since the intervention was implemented? Measuring the impact of your learning solution should be fairly simple if you have identifiable new data and the baseline data as your starting point.
Additionally, you can find success indicators to support your impact proof by utilizing the learning metrics provided by your LMS. You could, for instance, make use of the completion rate statistics in your LMS. This metric is a fantastic way to gauge how well your content is delivered, how well learners interact with the learning solution, and both.
Metrics on employee engagement can also be used to determine what is effective for the learners and modify the material to suit their requirements. Relevance scores, responses, and qualitative feedback in discussion forums, for instance, show that the course’s content was useful and effective to the learners as a whole.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, if you want to show real business impact from learning and development (L&D), you need to take a performance-driven approach. L&D leaders can find and fix enduring problems by reorienting their attention from merely fulfilling employee training requirements to tackling organizational performance issues. L&D efforts become focused and intentional when a complete performance gap analysis is carried out, subject matter experts are consulted, and the analytics in the learning management system (LMS) are employed.
Achievement is gauged by measurable gains in key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as completion rates. L&D leaders can demonstrate the genuine benefits of their initiatives in improving employee performance and optimizing business processes by adopting a performance-oriented mindset. Talk to our LMS experts for more details.