Employee training is where many organizations invest lots of money. Hiring trainers, investing in infrastructure, and money is other things that contribute to the expenses of employee training. This shows that employee training is a costly affair, so organizations should ensure it is a positive return. ROI of the employee training should be one of the primary outcomes while designing the training program.
Many managers believe that the purpose of training is to boost the productivity of the employees and profits of the organization. To an extent, it is true, but there are many metrics that indicate the success degree of your employee training. So, let us look at a few ways to measure the ROI of training.
1)Determine the goals of employee training:
You need to understand what you would want to achieve by the end of the employee training. It might be to increase sales and boost work productivity etc, you need to be very specific on the goals. So, the employee training program should precisely complement your goals, only then you can achieve your goals. You might not find the impact of employee training immediately after you finish it, it might take a few more months to find out whether you have achieved the goals of employee training or not.
2)Data mining:
Many organizations leverage eLearning tools(learning management systems) like DigitalChalk which provides some training metrics that give better insights on the quality of the training. These metrics include time spent on each course, dropout rates and time is taken to complete an activity, etc. These variables help you understand the performance of your employees better. For instance, if the drop rate is high, it means that the session was not engaging or difficult to understand.
3)Feedbacks:
Feedbacks are a great way to find out how the training has been received by your employees. If you conduct feedback midway during the training, you can understand the difficulties faced by the employees. It can be related to the course syllabus, tutors, timings, or any other training-related issues. Negative feedback indicates that you need to revisit a few strategies in the training or fix a few things before it’s too late.
4)Engagement levels:
The important metric to measure the ROI of training is by finding out employee engagement levels. See how interactive the training sessions are, there should be proper communication between the learners and tutor. Create social media channels and ask your employees to post their queries there, if the social media channel is active, it shows that the engagement levels are higher. Along with this, conducting tests to find out the performance of the students, it is also a good indication to find out engagement levels. Through all these processes, if you understand that the engagement levels are higher than you can come to a conclusion that your training program is adding some value to the employees.
5)Measure productivity:
Measuring productivity is an important factor to know the ROI of training. If you see a spike in task completion rate, better teamwork, and communication, you can assume that the ROI is decent.
To measure productivity, you should compare the volume of work your employee completes in an hour before and after the training. Let’s say you’re the operations manager in a content outsourcing company. You have five employees and each employee can write 300 words in an hour, on average. After sending your employees for training that’s designed to boost productivity, you can measure the rate of work that now they can write 450 words per hour. So, this clearly indicates that there is some increase in productivity.
Conclusion:
To wind up, there are a few ways to measure the ROI of training as we mentioned in the article. Irrespective of the industry, these five methods can help you get a rough idea of how to determine ROI.
