It is a common complaint for many HR managers who are seeking funding in order to send their people for training. Unfortunately in this day and age, it is likely that your bosses are going to demand some kind of return on investment.

But, you might be wondering: Stocks I can handle but how in the world can I determine a return on investment for a training program? Well, it’s simple, and all it really requires is a detailed understanding of training program evaluations.

I often approach HR managers to figure out what they want. The sad truth is that many of them have no real clue what they want. They simply want content to be covered in a training. To be a strategic partner in the development of organizational goals, the HR manager must utilize training as a weapon against their competitors. By developing people, you can do a lot of things including increasing leadership capability, enhancing productivity, mastering innovation and improving sales. All of these are specific training agenda that you, as a HR manager, need to drive.

Conducting A Task Analysis
I often recommend that the HR department form up a clear set of task analyses in order to ensure that the employee knows what to do and how to perform at their best. This increases their motivation to want to learn and improve their capabilities.

In addition, they will know that you have a clear set of fair measures to determine if they are doing their job or not. In that case, you should also have the same criteria for the positions they should be promoted to. By having a clear idea as to where they need to go, they will have a better sense of where to place their efforts in learning and developing themselves.

Many medium sized companies no longer have control over their employees’ task lists. It’s a daily hazard of firefighting, so much so that the HR department has things to do other than doing a task analysis and documenting the jobs that are being done. If you are in this position, remember that if you don’t get things done properly, there could be a lot of inefficiencies, costing the company a lot of money by not being able to track and measure performance effectively!

Determine A Performance Management Agenda
With Singapore’s current emphasis on productivity, it is essential for companies to decide what makes good performance. A lot of factors are involved, and of course, training will be something on your agenda. However, to improve performance, you may not need to increase your training budget.

Performance can be enhanced in various ways:

• Creating a Performance Management System. At lower levels, processes are simplified by getting people to follow a performance management system. This can be as complex as an internal content management system, or as simple as the sharing of corporate best practices on a regular basis through email.
• Building a systematic coaching culture. Across the organization, coaching and mentoring should be a major agenda for the purpose of propagating knowledge in the organization. It is also possible to measure the value of coaching by looking at job satisfaction indexes in the organization, how many subordinates under one manager get promoted, how much more result does a team get compared with another given the total number of actual hours worked. Managers and leaders should be trained as coaches to help maximize their time together with their subordinates.
• Measurement as your baseline. This means that you have to create tools to measure improvement of performance. It’s far from just a survey that determines what you like. There are many other factors to measure, such as (1) the likelihood that the training or coaching attendee will take action (this is known as motivation to transfer), (2) the belief about one’s efforts being taken seriously (self-efficacy) and (3) organizational climate of support and reward for a specific behavior. Such measurements need to have a clear training as well as a transfer needs analysis. Measuring these is as simple as knowing how to craft your hypothesis, while testing and comparing across different groups. By increasing your research base, it will make your agenda more convincing. Even pilot programs can be measured for effectiveness, adoption, and sustained performance after an intervention is carried out.

For more information about how to help your human resources department tap into a higher source of results-oriented learning and development capabilities, contact us at 6881-8881 and speak to our program consultants from the Corporate Division, and let us partner you for greater training and development results!