Value is something every department in every business understands. Why would a business run teams that weren’t adding value? It is vital for any L&D team to measure their impact, but as any experienced learning professional knows, it’s difficult. By historically reporting back on inputs and costs, over time, L&D teams have given business leaders a great excuse to expect them to lower the costs of staff development and keeping a workforce on its feet.
The good news, is that any team can position themselves as a crucial part of the business – whether or not they are used to looking at return on investment, or dealing with an organisation that just wants courses.
To start with, the L&D team has to draw a line in the sand and stop articulating its value solely through efficiency. In order to avoid being seen as “the department that cuts costs”, today’s L&D teams must demonstrate value to the business. Our research says this is a challenge in itself, with 40% of L&D teams having assigned board-level accountability for learning and only 17% of those agreeing metrics with business leaders and using those metrics when evaluating the impact of learning interventions.
Over the last four years, we have analysed our data to look at the bottom-line business impact of learning interventions. From this, we have identified the following 12 “external” areas of evidence that L&D practitioners could be tracking (or asking for reports on) in order to prove the value of their L&D strategy.
Talent:
Market share:
Products and services:
Efficiency in training:
As you can see from this list, there are plenty of opportunities for L&D teams to capture and track evidence of how they create value, which then empowers them to challenge the business status quo.
Our data also shows that by aligning learning with business objectives business leaders are much more committed to the learning agenda.
Highly aligned companies can demonstrate the bottom line benefit that they bring, which encourages buy-in from the business. Our data shows that:
L&D professionals want to speed up the application of learning in the workplace and integrate learning into the workflow. They need to know which actions will help achieve these things and what will create the most value for the business. However, trying to take a step back and assess what needs changing first, can be a real headache.
That’s why we created the Towards Maturity Benchmark – to give learning leaders a structured framework that will help them identify the priorities that will bring results.
At every stage during the process, you will be challenged to think deeply about your learning strategy and reflect on what you are doing to accomplish your goals. It takes about one hour of your time, but it’s completely free – on top of that, over 84% of last year’s participants said they received new ideas for improving their services from the reflection process alone.
To benchmark your L&D strategy, visit www.towardsmaturity.org/benchmark
Hear Marnie Threapleton, Head of Advisory Services at Towards Maturity, present on ‘Learner determined learning’ at this year’s World of Learning Conference. At 11:10 on Thursday 20 October, Marnie will be talking through:
You can sign up to the Conference and benefit from up to a 30% early booking discount here.