People development ensures your employees have the right resilience, innovation and behaviours to perform better, beat the competition and achieve commercial success in this highly competitive economic environment.
But how do you demonstrate tangible results to the rest of the organisation and deliver a quantifiable return on investment? Our five recommendations for doing this successfully are as follows:
- Build a business case
- Develop tangible performance measures
- Involve your leadership team
- Make the design of the programme suit your culture
- Measure the effect it has
We look at each of these in turn and explain why these outcomes are important and how to achieve them. We’ve also included them in a handy guide that you can request for free from us.
1. Build a business case
Why is this important?
Not forecasting the value that a programme will bring you organisation means that it might not get investment approval and start at all. Not measuring the results of a programme means you don’t know it’s bottom line impact and the commercial benefit it provides.
80% of learning and development professionals agree developing employees is top-of-mind for the executive team. But one of the greatest challenges facing people development programmes is the risk of limited budgets and an inability to demonstrate return on investment.
How can you do it?
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Case study One manager at a major UK attraction used a development programme to ensure that all of her team were delivering a consistent experience to their customers: “It was clear that our team had varying levels of experience, tolerance and resilience when dealing with challenging conversations with visitors. We wanted to provide them with a programme of development, so they could deliver effective customer service and create the best experience for visitors.” The outcome was the team learnt how to build trust and rapport, leading to an improved confidence in their ability to deal with customers. “The whole team now act in a controlled, confident manner with visitors. Other people in the business have commented about how well they deal with situations.” |
2. Develop tangible performance measures
Why is this important?
Talk to key stakeholders who will benefit from the programme. Your senior decision makers will tell you what matters most to them. Understand the measures they use and include them in your business case.
One HR director confirmed the benefits of ensuring that people development programmes include metrics and use a commercial approach: “We used to talk about retention and the business switched off. So, we started to talk about the commercial impact of key people leaving to our bottom line and customer experience and suddenly the business wanted to know more. Everything people related needs to be translated into a commercial language.”
Another HR director concurred: “Some finance directors and CEOs still perceive people issues to be less important than others they face. So, change your language and the context to raise their significance and put financials alongside them”.
How can you do it?
Strategic objectives versus measure | |
Requiring the business to increase its market share | Useful measures are the accessible market percentage of total market and the major competitor’s market share. |
Low productivity in the business and a need to increase this | Low productivity is often linked with employee motivation, measures to consider are:
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Requiring the business to be more innovative | Consider looking at measures that would show increased innovation such as:
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Downsizing specific areas of the business | To measure how downsizing has affected your business you could use measures like the revenue per employee or the human capital ROI. |
To improve resilience in the business | A measure to consider is the average percentage increase in employee resilience, confidence of employees to fulfill certain tasks or employee engagement. |
Drive sales within the business and increase profitability | Looking specifically at your sales team, people development measures could be:
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Insufficient talent in the organisation with the need to pipeline for future growth | This is becoming more prevalent in organisations, particularly the need to be more diverse. Measures could include:
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To improve the service level for new and existing customers | You could look at measures such as:
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Case study One HR leader was able to prove the value of their development programme by asking about confidence before and after the training: “We saw a 22% increase in confidence overall with a particular highlight being a 30% increase in our people’s confidence to coach their teams rather than tell them what to do. In order to embed and sustain these changes, we ask the questions again after three months and six months. I have worked in HR for over twenty years and this was the only time I was able to categorically show a return on investment for a development programme.” |
3. Involve your leadership team
Why is this important?
Include your leaders as they set the example that others follow. Often leaders at the top of the organisation will agree to a development programme, but not feel the need to attend themselves. To ensure success leaders should role model the behaviours expected and as such, by attending they increase credibility.
How can you do it?
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4. Make the design of the programme suit your culture
Why is this important?
Training activity typically interrupts the rhythm of a normal working week. In a sense, as the organiser of a people development programme, this is a time when you are ‘on show’ to others in your organisation and subject to scrutiny.
People development programmes should be tailored around your organisation to get the best reaction and engagement from people on a development programme
How can you do it?
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5. Measure the effect
Why is this important?
Quantifying behavioural changes and anecdotal feedback from programme attendees means you gather a combination of both quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative will allow you to demonstrate improvements in financial performance. The qualitative can be in the form of feedback from your employees to assess attitude and behavioural changes.
How can you do it?
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In conclusion
Quality training and development requires careful consideration and planning, but following the steps above mean the benefits will pay for themselves and ensure that you get return on investment.
For a friendly conversation about your organisation’s people development challenges, call us on +44 (0)1491 414 010.