Learning’s role in performance improvement

- Think back to a meeting with other internal stakeholders. Chances are you heard phrases like how do we reduce costs? How can we speed up production? And how can we increase revenues? What these and many other questions have in common is their focus on improving performance. Your leaders preoccupy themselves with three core businesses aspects, one, to reduce business risk, two, manage organizational change and three, to continually improve performance. But of the three, improving performance is not only a preoccupation, but it's also a leadership obsession. In the current business environment, leaders know that knowledge drives business. Why, because knowledge is something a competitor can't replicate, and it differentiates one business from another. It may not seem like it, but your leaders expect that their employees possess, and more importantly, effectively apply the skills and knowledge to drive business performance. There are two foundational elements you must know about performance. First, it's an interdependent process. And second, it is evaluated keeping the past and future in mind. As an interdependent process, business leaders must consider all of the operational activities and groups that impact performance. For example, say a company wants to increase sales by 10%. Working together, the training practitioner and sales team identify the relevant skills employees require to achieve this key performance indicator. Proactive practitioners take it a step further, identifying how this sales increase affects other operational processes. For instance, the 10% sales increase may require a 15% increase in production. The practitioner will work closely with both sales and production to develop training that helps them to meet their interdependent KPIs. In addition, business leaders will benchmark future KPI expectations against the past performance to prove knowledge made a difference. Recently, a client sought to reduce product defects by 15% from last year's levels. Doing so would result in thousands of dollars in production savings and increase sales by 10%. After carefully analyzing how the production team functions, the training team created targeted, on-the-job coaching events to improve production practices. Within seven months, they reduced defects by 22%, a significant improvement from last year's levels, and as a bonus, increased customer satisfaction by 8%. Recognize your efforts in one operational area will affect the performance of other activities. Performance is something business leaders worry about. Be sure to investigate performance relationships, and then leverage them to prove the value of training.