There’s an old meme that is often quoted for the training and developments. It reports a conversation between a CEO and a CFO:
CFO: What happens if we spend all this money training our employees and they leave?
CEO: What happens if we don’t, and they stay?
The point to be considered is that organizations can’t afford to not train their employees. As the perspective on training and developments is changing, more and more companies are putting in efforts to train their employees in order to bring out their best performance. But, Are you paying enough attention to your Research & Development programs and continuously keeping a track of whether the training session has been paid off or not?
In our previous article, we spoke about the E-Learning advantages (find it out here) and as we are very much aware of the fact that E-learning has become an experience, it is becoming important for the retailers to keep a track of their training investments and developments.
What is ROI for trainings?
At this moment you must be wondering whether your training program is working well for your employees, is it worth the cost, are employees learning efficiently or not? But, before getting into the details, let’s have a quick look at what ROI stands for Training and Development.
Depending who you ask, training ROI could be described as a measurable increase in skills, greater annual revenue, or simply the number of trained employees, according to E-Learning Industry article. One of the important factor to be noted while calculating the ROI on trainings and development is the employees performance. Having said that, a study by Accenture showed that for every dollar invested in training, companies received $4.53 in return. That’s a 353% ROI.
From the employee's performance perspective, let's have a look at how to calculate the ROI on trainings. Depending on the training objectives, here are some measures to determine your training ROI.
It is difficult to get the perfect measure of engagement value of all the learners but here are some of the measures that could help you to get the approx details of the learners engagement. This can be achieved by looking at the completion rates, such as course or activity completion, and calculating the number of participants at live online workshops and events. But, it could be possible that learners are physically present but are not engaged. In such situations, it is important to see how frequently learners are becoming a part of discussions and how accurate is their performance. This can give all the retailers a reflection of learners engagements.
A study by McKinsey unveiled the shocking reality that only half of organizations keep track of their employee feedback from training programs. To make it more concrete, it is always a good idea to take a step further and conduct a survey by directly asking the employees about their satisfaction and enjoyment level.
This essential step helps you to check the output after the course completion. All you need to do is compare the pre-training and post-training performance, or make the groups of trained with untrained groups and you will be able to witness the effectiveness of the training program. This is one of the critical training ROI measurement called as KSA (knowledge, skills and abilities) as it tells you how much the learners have actually learned.
Action speaks louder than words so it is crucial to test the performance of the employees in a practical environment. Check their performance in job tasks and challenges, use supervisor ratings to calculate the return on training investment for the performance.
By effective training programs, learners not only get engaged but also show growth in their performance and learn new set of skills. Eventually, with the improved performance, business benefits and achieves productivity.
% ROI = net benefits (achieved by measuring the learners performance) ÷ program costs x 100.
Happy evaluation!!