Question

The value of training

One day, Dave Palm, the director of training at LensCrafters, got a call suggesting that top executives were looking to improve the company’s bottom line, and couldn’t find enough tangible evidence that the company’s training programs were producing a measurable return on the company’s investment. Top management at this optical retailer understood that employee training was important, but they wanted to know what evidence was available to show that there was in fact a payoff to the organization from the money being spent on training. The phone conversation ended with a challenge, “What are you going to do about this?” If you were the director of training in this situation, what types of measures would you like to have available before you respond to top management? That is, what types of evidence do you think management would find convincing that training was having a positive impact on the organization? Why did you pick the measures that you did? How would you go about collecting the data for the measures you have selected?

Answer 1

In terms of training and its beneficial effect on the bottomline and profitability of the company, the leadership would find concrete proof convincing. They will be provided with concrete proof in the form of return on training investment, increased productivity and production rates due to training, increased sales volume due to training, reduced client complaints due to training, and increased customer retention rates due to training.

I have chosen the above steps because these measures will increase the beneficial effect of practice in a quantitative way. For example, return on investment is a measure of the monetary benefits an organization receives over a period of time, and this benefit accrues to it because of the investment it made to train its employees. This will demonstrate the management that the input usually exceeds the output from training.

In order to gather information, I will have to determine the expenses of training and the advantages accruing to the organisation as a result of the training. The data on expenses and advantages can be acquired from the HR department, which completes the training and the department of finance and accounts, which stores all information linked to expenses and revenues. I can receive information from the operations department for certain metrics such as increased productivity and compare the information before and after the training to show the beneficial effect of the training.