This KaizenTip came to you from Richard Nugent of the Kaizen Team.
Does your business know the true value that your training adds to the bottom line? If you are a training manager, do you find it hard to justify your healthy training budget to the rest of the business? If you are a trainer or even in the operational side of your organisation, do you wonder whether the training you’re delivering (or participating in) really works?
For the first time the complicated and sometimes controversial subject of evaluation has been ‘Kaizen-ed’. Based on our Five Principles of Brain Friendly Learning, these new principles bring evaluation to life, and enable you to develop an approach which ensures that, in addition to your interventions being seen as highly successful, you’ll be able to produce information for the business that highlights the most important results of training interventions for them.
It’s not what’s right or wrong, it’s what works!
Evaluation is one of those topics that stirs up strong emotion in training professionals. Experts in the field can often be found extolling the virtues of their preferred approach, and decrying any others as ‘wrong’. As you’d expect, we have a different view. We believe that the right evaluation strategy is the one that works for you, for your organisation and for the interventions that you are measuring.
We find that many of our clients, including many of the largest blue chip organisations, are just beginning to develop their processes for measuring their operational success. Naturally we work with these clients to help them develop their measurement capabilities, AND we find that they want to continue to measure the success of learning interventions in very specific ways. They expect approaches that suit their requirements at that time, rather than the prescriptive ‘bottom line’ measurements that some feel is the only way to evaluate training.
The Head of Customer Services in one of Europe’s largest energy suppliers was absolutely clear on how we were to measure the success of one intervention with her management team. ‘If I can see them doing more of the jobs that they should be doing then it will have been a success”. For her, no more scientific measures were needed. She would meet with them, and observe them, and if there were doing the job better, the training was a success.
Of course we have clients whose whole existence is based around measurement, and the approach we take to evaluating the success of interventions with them is very different. We have worked with clients to accurately measure the ‘£ sign’ savings of change interventions. We’ve also measured the savings from HR interventions and the cost reductions achieved by implementing the learning from Brain Friendly Learning Workshops in terms of reduced design and delivery times.
The common theme for me through all this is ensuring that the stakeholders, whether internal or external, get the information that they needed to enable them to see that the interventions were successful. Applying the five principles of brain friendly evaluation will help you develop outstanding evaluation strategies specifically for your organisation and for your interventions.
Kaizen’s Big Five for Evaluation
Honour Uniqueness
Each organisation is different, as is each project and each training intervention. Why then do we try to apply one set ‘model’ for evaluation as a panacea for measuring training results? We agree that using Kirkpatrick or Phillips as a base approach to measuring the success of training can be useful. However we believe that evaluation strategies should be built around a set of tools and approaches that are right for that organisation or project, based on a factors such as outcomes, resources and expertise.
Keep It Real
How sophisticated is your organisation in collating and measuring data? Is every penny accounted for during projects or is it more important to see results in terms of customer feedback or product success? Our experience is that evaluation strategies rarely match the measurement culture in organisations. For example, in organisations where data collation and analysis is part and parcel of everyday working life, ‘evaluation’ often stops at gathering end of course reaction sheets. In other organisations, well-meaning training teams carry out full and detailed evaluations across varying levels, only to find that the business doesn’t value or understanding the information. By matching your approach to evaluation to the organisations approach to measurement, you will ensure that you demonstrate your value without wasting valuable time and money.
Creation not just Consumption
Those of you who are graduates of our Brain Friendly Learning workshop will know that learning is about the creation of value, meaning and ACTION on the part of the learner, not merely the consumption of information. Anything generated by the learners will be many times more powerful than anything the trainer can create. This is also true for evaluation. If you can partner with your client group (whether internal or external) to develop the approach to evaluation, this can only be more powerful than a model developed by ‘the training department’ or some guru from the past. What measurement criteria does the organisation have in place already that you could use to measure the success of this intervention? Building a partnership approach to evaluation ensures that the business buys into your approach, and guarantees that you are able to deliver exactly what the organisation is looking for. In addition to this, you are taking a true consultative role by creating more ‘resourcefulness’ in your organisation.
Rich and Multi-sensory
We already know that memories are stronger when multi-faceted, but what’s this got to do with evaluation? Well often the secret to a great evaluation strategy is in the richness of the exploration. It’s not just about achieving all of targets and meeting all of the needs; it’s about being able to show a range of customers the results that are important to them. What results will be most important to those taking part in the training? What is important for their line managers? What about the HR Manager or the Finance Director? Having explored and gathered the data you need to answer these questions how can you deliver the information in a memorable and powerful way? Even the most detailed and professional ‘evaluations’ tend to end with a report that is circulated around the organisation
There might even be a PowerPoint presentation to back up the report and this is presented in the usual ‘sage on the stage’ style to anyone who will listen. We believe that the results of an intervention should be shared in such a way that the success of the project is remembered as strongly as the intervention itself.
State is Everything…(well almost)
Have you ever considered what state you want to generate from your interventions as a whole? Even more than that, have you ever considered what state you want to generate through your approach to evaluation? Can you imagine what it would be like to generate a state of intense excitement through the results of your evaluation? We believe that the core outcome of your evaluation is to leave the learners, the organisation and you in a better state than before. This should be through a combination of all of the other principles and of course will be led by your state. Naturally results are vital, but how you arrive at these results can be just as important – as is how you share them, especially if the bottom-line results aren’t quite as positive as you’d have expected. We must use everything we already know about the power of state to ensure that our evaluation strategies have the maximum impact.
