Organizations are increasingly putting money into employee training efforts. In the U.S., among companies and educational institutions with 100 or more employees, spending on external training products and services increased 32.5% in 2017 to $90.6 billion.
Overall, on average, companies spent $1,075 per learner last year compared to $814 per learner in 2016, according to the
Your organization may be allotting a lot of resources to employee development because you need to maintain market standing, enhance employee engagement, and increase productivity. But have you stopped to calculate the ROI on your employee development investment? In other words, how do you know your employee development is actually working to meet those goals?
In this two-part blog series on professional development, we'll begin by looking at why industry and academic publications question the efficacy of individual and organizational development efforts. Once you understand the challenges, we'll dig into how to make sure your employee development is actually working.
identified the possible negative influence of pre-training motivation (or lack thereof) on development efforts. Another addressed the need for careful learning and goal orientation. Development initiatives can work, but they require 鈥sufficient front-end analysis鈥 (Collins & Holton, 2004) to ensure the right knowledge and skills are being offered to the right people. In the coaching context, coachees may have if they 鈥渟et too difficult goals, devote less time to accomplish them or have low pre-coaching motivation.鈥
Additionally, professional development is less effective when seen as a single-stage process. What an individual learns from attending a lecture or workshop, for instance, needs to be contextualized within their daily efforts on the job. Employees may leave a development experience inspired, yet they can鈥檛 actually implement or apply what they learned in their day-to-day because of .
In a 2016 Harvard Business Review article titled, 鈥淲hy Leadership Training Fails,鈥 a trio of researchers noted, 鈥渙nly one in four senior managers report that training was critical to business outcomes.鈥 They further offered the anecdote of a manufacturer investing $20 million for a state-of-the-art center for safety training yet still suffering multiple fatalities at its operating plants. After all, the 鈥渟eeds鈥 of a developmental intervention can only take root in the right climate and environment.
Strengths-based training has also been scrutinized. While Gallup鈥檚 StrengthsFinder is now used by , a Harvard Business Review article notes: there are no scientific studies backing this approach. Plus, focusing on strengths can foster a false sense of competence. At the same time this 鈥鈥 approach leads to expending resources on lower-performers (when the top 20% are responsible for 80% of revenue, profits, or productivity, per the Pareto Principle).
Leadership development, too, has had its time under the critical lens. Another noted, 鈥渢he vast majority of leadership programs are set curricula delivered through classroom-taught, rationally based, individual-focused methods.鈥 However, this type of development isn鈥檛 suited to cultivate 鈥渋ntuitive, dynamic, collaborative, and grounded in here-and-now emotional intelligence.鈥
Suggestions to address these shortfalls include setting clear objectives, identifying the people who will benefit most from development initiatives, and making the learning experiential. Further, the literature calls for more
So, with all of these possible pitfalls to your employees鈥 professional development, how can you ensure the opportunities you are offering your people are making a positive impact?
Many professional development programs require a rejig. Too many organizations focus their development efforts on hard skills. Yet 鈥渦pskilling鈥 the employees doesn鈥檛 encourage people to think or behave differently. Nor does this approach help individuals to influence the interacting systems at play in their working environments.
Put simply, the individual who is trained to do new and exciting things with the company鈥檚 customer relationship management platform may gain the ability to streamline his or her work process. However, if this individual鈥檚 talent for communication or creative problem-solving remain undeveloped, he or she could still face obstacles if the rest of the team is resistant.