Your effectiveness as an Learning and Development team must measure up to the current business context, not the business context of five years ago. How do you track progress and keep up, whilst making the right decisions?
Learning and development teams know there is a fundamental problem with collecting data that matters to them, such as feedback on training courses, time spent on training courses, numbers of attendees on courses and so on. The problem in gathering this data, is the fact that it has very little relevance to the business. Why? Because the business wants to know the impact its investment in learning and development is having on business outcomes, not how successful a training course has been for those who attended it.
Those being asked to prove the impact that L&D is having find themselves asking the questions, “How do you figure out the effectiveness of your Learning and Development function?” They need data to prove the extent to demonstrate that they are adopting modernised learning approaches that deliver the outcomes the business needs: improved productivity, engagement; revenue and agility.
Data is vital; it provides the evidence you and your team need to understand impact and drive performance. An invaluable source of external, credible data is performance benchmarking – this provides robust, genuine and independent evidence on Learning and Development’s performance; the effectiveness and impact of the learning process. It enables organisations to reflect on their own performance and see how they compare against peers and top performing organisations.
However, in likeness to internal data-gathering, organisations are failing to grasp the opportunity on offer. Towards Maturity’s research shows that on average, only 23% actively benchmark their learning strategy and practices against others in their industry, compared to 41% of top learning organisations. Only 17% of the average actually use that benchmarking data for performance improvement, compared to 35% of top learning organisations.
Let’s start by defining it. Benchmarking is the process of comparing Key Performance Indicators for one organisation with the indicators of others who are considered to represent the industry standard or best practice for that field. Business benchmarking focuses on two aspects: Key Performance Indicators (or KPI’s, comparing outcomes) and performance benchmarks (comparing activities).
This is nothing new; businesses have been benchmarking since the early 1990s in order to develop new strategic direction and improve performance. Since 2003, Towards Maturity have been demonstrating effective practice benchmarking principles to help Learning and Development departments do the same.
Our benchmark helps organisations review their learning strategies, including the role of technology-enabled learning, through the application of our framework of effective practices. We define the Towards Maturity Model™ on six areas that we call workstreams, against which we measure the maturity of all organisations that benchmark. These workstreams reflect the characteristics of more mature organisations.
It is important that benchmarks remain relevant and as future-proof as possible, which is why we continually ask leading thinkers and practitioners in Learning and Development to sense-check our benchmark. This is critically important in an ever-changing world. Your effectiveness as an Learning and Development team must measure up to the current business context, not the business context of five years ago.
The 2016 Towards Maturity benchmark, which opened on 11 May, has already been completed by 200 L&D professionals. Our data so far is showing that there is now a shift away from technology as a cost-cutting tool in learning towards that of a performance enhancer. For example, 95% of respondents want to use technology to improve organisational performance (significantly up so far, from 85% last year) and 86% want to focus on building compliant behaviours (again up from 78% last year).
So far, this year’s Benchmark also shows that the aspirations of L&D professionals remain high, but there are barriers to change. The benchmarking process helps L&D professionals identify the activities to overcome these barriers and realise their goals. It helps identify the strategies, technologies and techniques that will engage learners and improve organisational performance. In short, it will give you the data to help prove the business impact of your learning initiatives.
The 2016 Benchmark is open until 15th July. It is free to benchmark and requires just an hour to complete. To take the benchmark, click here.
Hear Marnie Threapleton, Head of Advisory Services at Towards Maturity, present on ‘Learner determined learning’ at this year’s World of Learning Conference. At 11:10 on Thursday 20 October, Marnie will be talking through:
You can sign up to the Conference and benefit from up to a 30% early booking discount here.