PLANT YOUR TRAINING and WATER OFTEN

After years of conducting impact and ROI studies for some of the top Fortune 100 companies in the world, it became glaringly obvious to me that the biggest factor predicting the effectiveness  of training programs had little to do with the quality of the training, the method by which it was delivered, or the nature of the audience.  In fact, it had everything to do with the immediate work environments employees were returning to right after their training was done.  Every employee takes his/her new knowledge and skills from training back to their own unique work environment. And depending on all the environmental influences in that work environment, they are either inspired to or discouraged from applying that training on the job. That is, based on these critical environmental influences, the same training program can work wonders for some employees and for others it becomes a complete flop.  And because these post-training "climates" are so diverse and unique for each employee, it is absolutely crucial to measure them, understand which factors are most common across your organization, and which climates will be the most powerful when it comes to maximizing  the impact of your training. 

While these climate factors certainly hold the key to defining a training success or failure, they have also been responsible for making training so hard to measure over the past few decades.  Because there can exist such a huge variety of climate factors within and across any given organization, and because they can influence employees in very unique ways, the results, business impact, and ROI of any one training program can be inconsistent and hard to quantify in any reliable way.  However, by including some form of climate assessment within your measurement strategy, you can evolve the conversation from "How did training work?" to "How do we make it work better?"  By adding this layer of climate measurement, you turn a static post-mortem report about the  impact of training into a living, dynamic report about why training worked better for some rather than others, and how you can improve that impact in the future. 

For this reason, I added a Level 6 - Transfer Climate analysis to the traditional five levels of evaluation.  I call this new level the “transfer climate” because it represents all the factors that can either help or hinder the “transfer” of learning from the training experience back to the job.  As with anything you try to transfer, plant, or replant somewhere else, no matter how strong the leaves or how pretty the flowers, you still need just the right soil with just the right sun, and just the right amount of rain. So too with training, no matter how thoughtful and well-designed the training, you still need to make sure all the right factors are in place to care for and nurture it through that critical and precarious incubation period.  If the climate is suitable for learning transfer, the training sticks, thrives on its own, and ultimately blossoms into fruitful returns.  If the climate is not suitable for learning transfer, the training impact dies there and all your time and resources wither on the vine.  So if you want your ROI to grow, make sure you plant it in the right climate and water it often.