Why do some businesses thrive and others struggle? There are countless possible reasons including location, product selection, marketing and investment capital. However, oftentimes it’s the way customers are treated.
In today’s competitive business environment, improving performance is vital to success, and learning and development’s role in improving performance is increasingly more important. However, according to research from Bersin by Deloitte, 59 percent of companies have difficulty connecting learning to business outcomes.
Learning is not the outcome. It is no longer adequate to measure superficial metrics like how many people accessed a course, what grade they received or how many people completed the course. This doesn’t tell you anything beyond the fact that the learning event happened. The outcome of learning, however, is a change in behavior that impacts performance in a positive manner.
This is a huge paradigm shift for many organizations. It is a good idea to take a step back and see that it is not about the learning event. Instead, it’s about employee performance and how you can address that through your content, development and delivery architecture.
What L&D needs to understand is that everything begins with a learning content strategy. You can’t drive performance without understanding what and how content is being accessed to drive an individual’s performance.
If you don’t have a content strategy that identifies the right content, for the right people, at the right time, your workforce is going to be pretty frustrated. What is most important to the modern learner right now is the ability to access information at the moment of need where they can apply it immediately to better perform their job. They don’t want to have to sort through mountains of content to get the information they need. Another critical piece to your content strategy is appropriately tagged content for easy discovery.
In addition to a content strategy, you need a delivery methodology that enables learners to access learning wherever, and whenever they need it. You have to broaden your scope to consider that content might not just be accessed on a desktop. Your learners probably want to access it on mobile tablets and sometimes even smartphones. Ask yourself, how well will that course work on a tablet or a smartphone? This is especially important for those companies with people out in the field who access their learning on a mobile device.
Finally, it’s essential to create a learning measurement strategy that aligns with the business goals. What is the change in behavior you need to influence in order to improve the overall business performance? How will you measure that? What departments and key people do you need to involve and align with to have the dataset that gives you a complete picture?
Certain metrics, like which content is the most popular, and which content never gets touched, are important for understanding how effective the content itself is. However, you also have to look at the overall dataset of how your workforce is performing and correlate that with their learning experience. Is it improving the performance of the learners and creating the behavior change you were striving for? If not, it is time to reevaluate.
It is also worth mentioning that measurement is a continuous process. It can’t be a one-off project that you undertake once. High-performing learning organizations are continually measuring how learning is tied to business performance. They identify the performance gaps in the business and understand how to apply learning that is most relevant to each individual to bring about the behavior change as quickly as possible.
