Training your team is crucial to the long-term success of the company. Businesses that grow year-on-year rely heavily on training initiatives that keep their staff up to date with the latest skills, insights, and technology. 

However, not all training programs are created equal. Some will revolutionize the way you work while others will, unfortunately, be seen as “busy work”. 

As an HR professional, you can evaluate the effectiveness of training programs by keeping track of key metrics. These metrics can track productivity, assess engagement, and ensure your training initiatives achieve a positive return on investment (ROI). 

Engagement Metrics

Training programs that engage your employees are worth their weight in gold. When folks are fully engaged, you can feel reassured that the training program you’ve selected is worthwhile. However, measuring engagement can be tricky. Many employees will fly through the training program as quickly as possible, meaning that you may get a false positive if you use the completion rate as a measure of engagement. 

Instead, consider using the Kirkpatrick Model to test your team and assess whether or not they authentically engaged with the training program. The Kirkpatrick Model has four phases, including: 

• Reaction: Use surveys, focus groups, interviews, and observation to assess how learners interact with the training program. Simply observing the reaction of folks who complete training modules will give you a clear impression of whether or not the program is well-received and worthwhile. 
• Learning: Employees who authentically engage with training programs will learn from the experience. As such, pre- and post-training tests and quizzes are a great way to track engagement and figure out if folks were engaged or simply going through the motions. 
• Behavior: Behavioral changes at work are a sure sign that folks have paid attention to the training program. Behavioral changes can’t be faked either. Keeping track of changes via performance assessments or workplace observations can help you assess whether or not folks would benefit from further training. 
• Results: Use pre-established, highly relevant statistics to determine whether or not staff engaged with training. For example, if you aimed to improve safety in the workplace, are there now fewer workplace accidents? This quantifies staff engagement and lets you know whether or not your program has worked. 

The Kirkpatrick Model is highly effective as it assesses engagement from multiple perspectives. Embracing assessment methods like the Kirkpatrick Model can help you adopt an ethos of continuous improvement in the workplace, too. Responding to poor engagement quickly is crucial, as folks who intentionally overlook training will drag the business’s performance down over time. Alleviate engagement issues and craft successful training programs for your workplace by: 

• Diversify your approach by foregrounding the importance of hands-on experience and coaching/mentoring. This makes your training “real” and puts learners in the driver’s seat. 
• Democratize content creation to ensure that qualified mentors are able to actively participate in the creation of new training materials. This makes training relevant and boosts the credibility of your materials. 
• Accept that imperfection is a part of training programs and encourage folks to make the most of training materials — even if they aren’t perfect. 
• Schedule training well in advance to ensure that folks have enough time in their calendar and aren’t blindsided by sudden calls to stop their day-to-day activities and start training. 

These changes boost engagement and improve the efficacy of your training materials by foregrounding learner’s needs. Giving folks a chance to work directly with useful tools during training makes the course or program feel worthwhile, too. Just be sure to track performance following your training initiative to establish whether or not you achieved a positive ROI. 

Return on Investment

A positive ROI is the end goal of most training programs. After all, for-profit businesses are primarily concerned with boosting productivity and increasing profits. Being able to prove that your programs generate higher profits can help you motivate participants, too. Folks who see the value of training programs are far more likely to engage authentically than those who think your training initiatives are a waste of time. 

Tracking your ROI is particularly important today, as learning and development (L&D) is on the rise, as 96% of organizations are either maintaining or increasing their training budget. While pure profitability is the easiest way to track ROI, it may not be the most effective measure of your training programs. Profitability is usually too broad to yield any useful insights, as other external factors can influence whether or not your company yields higher profits. 

Instead, focus on KPIs that share a strong correlation with profitability and are tied to your training program. For example, if you host a training program for sales professionals, consider tracking metrics like call time, lead conversion rate, and market penetration rate. These metrics are strong indicators of your sales team’s effectiveness and share a close link with revenue. You can then compare the net benefits associated with training against the cost of the program you ran. 

Operational Metrics 

Tracking engagement and ROI is crucial if you want to convince decision-makers that your training programs are worthwhile. However, some training programs do not improve profitability or yield remarkably high engagement, yet are still crucial to the long-term success of your business. This idea is exemplified by safety training initiatives, which prevent costly accidents and protect your business’s brand reputation. 

Tracking operational metrics like lead response time or customer complaint resolution time can help improve your onboarding protocols, too. During onboarding you can help new hires understand that you embrace a culture of continuous learning and ensure that every new hire receives tailored training programs that are relevant to the role they’ve been hired for. For example, if you notice that many staff are ill-equipped to handle negative complaints from consumers, you can target this shortcoming during onboarding. 

Conclusion 

Effective training programs are the backbone of agile, modern organizations. However, you need to keep track of key metrics related to engagement, ROI, and operational efficiency if you want your training budget to grow. Keeping track of these metrics can help you improve your offering and spot shortcomings in your current methods. This is particularly important today, as recent insights show that most training programs are doomed to fail.