ROI and double standards

Last time we talked about Kirkpatrick’s model for evaluation and how important it is to use more that just level one especially in today’s economic climate .

While I was writing that piece I found myself getting more and more annoyed and, as I worked through why, the keyboard was taking more and more punishment, the word count was going up and up alarmingly and suddenly the last post became two posts.

So today  I want to focus on the last level.

Level four is where we look at what has changed in the business in terms of performance and or profit as a result of training interventions and it appears to be the most discussed (but possibly the least used). There has been and continues to be a great deal of debate throughout the training world about ROI (return on investment) for training but I really don’t see why. I can’t understand why it is any more difficult to find a way to measure training outputs as measuring any other kind of outputs.

“Ah,”  people will argue, “it’s because you can’t be clear about cause and effect. You can’t be absolutely sure that any change in business performance is attributed to the training you did and not some other change that occurred at the same time so you can’t justify any ROI.”

They are right.  This will make measuring ROI in training incredibly hard. But ONLY if you believe it’s all that matters. Which I don’t.

My answer is “I’m not bothered.”

At any one time, in almost every organisation, there will be lots of changes going on. Many will require significant amounts of investment. So how do all these other changes get justified?

Did anyone say “Mmmm, this is going to be really difficult to measure because we have some training going on at the same time and we won’t know whether the improvement we got was because of this or the training. We had better not invest this time.”  No. I am almost certain they didn’t.

Double Standard One:

Businesses happily ignore the fact that to some extent ROI outcomes will be affected by other changes in the organisation – except in training.

Any training I do will have an impact. Brain Friendly training does because it changes behaviour and different behaviour creates different performance and therefore results.

Other investments will also create a change in performance and results. Does it matter that I can’t separate the two out and attribute x amount of change to this and y amount of change to that?

In my view it doesn’t so long as I can produce a reasonably intelligent estimate (which is as much as a lot of funding applications are anyway).

I tend to take a holistic view of organisations so if training contributes to an overall uplift in performance I don’t much care whether it’s responsible for 20%, 50% or 80%. Each is interdependent on the other. So without both the training interventions and the other interventions neither will work as well as both.

This is why I am so sad (and more than a little ticked off!) that, as soon as the economic situation gets hard, training is one of the first budgets to get slashed. (Not just trimmed mind you, Slashed!) It seems so short-sighted, is disappointingly predictable (managers can be soooo lazy!)  and it also demonstrates another double standard.

Double Standard Two:

If the business can’t (or doesn’t) measure how much good training does –how does it know how much damage will be done if we stop doing it? Would you take that risk in any other part of the business?

It seems to me that these double standards are to some extent self inflicted. But I know this for sure – we will never climb out of difficult economic times fast enough if we do not invest in training. And as training professionals it is our responsibility to address these double standards and find ways to counter them. If bankers can justify bonuses (I am not saying rightly or wrongly before you start reaching for the comment button ) surely we can find a way to justify investment in training.

Lets stop saying how hard it is and start finding arguments that make it easy.

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