7 Hacks to Create an ROI for Your Learning Initiatives

Emma Weber

Updated June 10, 2021

It is so important in today’s business environment to demonstrate an impact from learning initiatives. Here are 7 hacks to help you create ROI for your learning initiatives.

 1. Design your initiative with your level of evaluation and transfer in mind

For learning transfer and evaluation to be really effective, we must start with the end in mind. We need to plan a program or initiative not only with learning objectives but with application objectives and impact objectives. It’s then much easier to evaluate the outcomes in relation to those objectives. When designing any learning initiative, I always recommend that we ask ourselves “what do I want to see or hear people doing differently as a result of this initiative back in their day to day role?”

2. Choose a level of evaluation appropriate to your resources

There are so many different evaluation options – so don’t bite off more than you can chew! Look at the resources you have and work with what you’ve got. You could use pulse checks, case studies, impact dashboards, or go all the way to ROI if you have the skills and resources. However – remember – Jack and Patti Phillips of the ROI Institute® suggest that seeking to measure ROI of every program is inappropriate, but for strategic initiatives it can be very beneficial. They recommend that when setting evaluation targets that only 5-10% of initiatives should be measured to ROI level.

3. Make friends with the “number” people in your organisation

Get to know the people that deal with the data in your organisations, it might be the accounting team or you might have a specific data analytics team. These people will help you to find the data to measure the ROI against real business data, not learning data.

You want to be speaking the language of the business, to the business.

4. Ask the participants to self-reflect on their personalised KPIs

You can’t get more personalised than individually chosen KPIs. Get participants to consider on an action plan how they will know if they have been successful? What business KPI can this action be measured against? Then all you need to do is get access to that KPI data and you can measure outcomes.

5.  Nominate your “expert” for outcomes

Choose who your expert is for a specific outcome. Who would know what business benefits that learning outcome has produced? The expert could be the participant, the manager, or a peer. Identifying who would know if a change has taken place and asking them whether they have observed it is a great hack – another gem I learnt from the ROI Institute® team!

6. Use PROGRESS review forms, not FEEDBACK forms

Create a follow up survey that measures the progress that has been made, NOT one that asks for feedback on how they have implemented learning. We confirm to learners that the progress review forms are a way for them to update the organisation on the progress they have made. That positioning gets a much higher response rate than any feedback form! In addition, by using the right questions on your progress review forms you can collect data that will enable stakeholders to assess reaction and learning evaluations as well as application and first-stage impact evaluation. See Our Easy Method to Showcase Training Results for more.

7. Tighten up your action planning

Supporting your learners to commit to what they will implement from any learning initiative is the gateway towards sustained learning and ROI. We have created a free action planning tool at www.turninglearningintoaction.com that is available online for anyone to use. It is a step by step, easy to navigate platform that takes the hard work out of action plan distribution! In one click the action plan can be distributed as a PDF to the learner and up to two people of their choice. The action plan will still need support but it’s a great first step!

 

 

Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash