Aligning Training with Organizational Goals and Objectives

It seems that many organizations embrace the strategy of reinventing and modernizing training processes and programs. Technology opens the door to many new opportunities and capabilities for enhancing employee learning and development.

Learning, though a vital part of company culture and continuous employee development, must still demonstrate a clear impact and justify the ROI of new programs. But how often are these initiatives actually effective, and how should an organization measure the value on their learning and training implementations?

In order to answer these questions, we must look at exactly what are the needs and requirements from multiple perspectives: the organization’s perspective; the people who are delivering the training; and the people who are attending the program.

Technology should be viewed as the tool that enables the organization to ensure that the consistency on content of training is high. Cost over the long-term is managed. With the usage of the right technology, companies can develop customized training based on organizational needs.

Creating Alignment With Organizational Goals and Objectives

The first critical point here is to ask and define: "What is our organizational strategy?" It should have clear linkage with the vision of organization, and approximately 3- 5 years of future thinking.

To design and understand organizational strategy, we should look at multiple data points that involve reviewing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT), as well as internal and external trends and people capabilities. This information helps to update or renew the vision and strategic position of the company.

Alignment is achieved by linking strategy with individual and team goals, and defining short-term milestones for these strategic points. This goal-setting process should be planned for the year and should involve the participation of as many team members as possible. Monthly team meetings help to stay updateand to make adjustments early enough to ensure progress.

Brief weekly individual progress meetings are held to ensure that progress is on track. Strategy maps and other linked (inter-connected) maps are useful to communicate to a larger audience and present a snapshot of strategy.

I'm a very big fan of Dr. Robert Kaplan of the Harvard Business School, co-creator of the Balanced Scorecard measure. I think his research work is the most valuable possession of 21st century. Many of the previous insights are supported by Kaplan’s research on communicating and managing strategy within the organization.

Dashboards should be designed to include customer metrics and process metrics. The ideal balance is about fifty percent of each component. As the process is redesigned and modernized, more emphasis should be on customer metrics. Internal process metrics should have all the three types of process metrics: input process, in-process and output process metrics.

Dashboard should be designed at three levels: organizational level, process level and (if possible) entity level. Financial metrics should be at the organizational level; training effectiveness metrics should be at the process level and environment, feedback on material metrics, etc should be at the entity level.

Calculation of training ROI should include direct factors such as efficiency improvement, defect reduction and a faster learning curve. Indirect factors that impacts ROI can be evaluated by employee opinion survey and informal feedback mechanism. Examples of indirect and long-term factors are culture building, attitude improvement and higher levels of engagement.

Bottom line: A clear strategy can only be of value when it is translated into a few crisp, critical goals, and when organization's resources are continually aligned toward their execution. Learning and development has the potential to create alignment with organizational goals and objectives, but must be continually examined and measured.

When learning and development initiatives are viewed as part of the company’s holistic strategy, they have the potential to increase workforce productivity and have measurable impact on ROI.