“We look at return on investment depending on client requirements,” Herron says. “You have the option of using survey measurements before and after training to measure progress. If for example, the training is about retaining employees, you can measure employee retention before and after the training. Ditto for absenteeism, which our research tells us it is a big problem.”
Herron says poor organisational culture is tied into leadership, not just at the top but at multiple levels throughout the organisation. “So, if you have a survey measuring organisational culture before and after training, you will get contrasting data.”
Saxon say he can calculate a dollar return on training, which saving hundreds of thousands per person. “Before we start, we sit down and say what do you want ‘Graham’ to achieve, and we ask Graham what he wants to achieve. We negotiate four or five outcomes. They might be turning up to meetings on time, improved delegation, and better-run team meetings.”
Saxon says LMI might ask Graham why he can’t delegate, and then try to solve the issue he raises.
“To measure delegation, we could look at downtime on equipment while everyone is waiting for Graham to make a decision, and that downtime leads to overtime.
“The overtime costs 60 bucks an hour, but he might say, ‘I can’t delegate because I don’t trust people’, So we train his staff so he can trust them, and they can handle the decisions. At the end of 10 or 12 weeks of training, if overtime is down from 60 hours to 20 hours and the downtime to two hours, I can justifiably say I have saved you $2400 a week, or $120,000 a year.”
Non-financial results
Not every goal is measurable, Saxon says. “Turning up late to meetings can just piss you off. You don’t know whether to ball them out in front of the others. But little things are important to demonstrable returns.”
Training is also a part of any good succession plan, Saxon says. “It is used to funnel talent, it upskills and prepares them for advancement. A significant workplace projects allows a company to take their talent out of the everyday environment, to stretch them and see what they can handle.”
Kogan says formal training constrains creative thinking and innovation. “Other reason this is important is that all our staff are taught to go against the grain, to swim upstream and question everything. We need innovation on daily basis.”
However, stress and burnout are just as likely to be the outcome of poor or non-existent training, Saxon says. “The issue is because we are all using flat management structures, we have all got stuff that we have to do ourselves; we are training and mentoring on the run.”
He has trained managers with 10-years-experience who say. “For 10 years I have hated this job, and now I understand what the role is!”
Saxon believes billions are lost because of the mismanagement of the first step into leadership. “You take a guy who is working with mates on Friday, and on Monday he is telling them what to do. If he isn’t any good, he disrupts the productivity of the team. So he leaves, and never takes on responsibly anywhere else, not because he is not capable, but because of a bad experience.”
