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A Backward Step

It’s the eternal business paradox. How do we achieve more with less? Of course, making available resources go further – essentially increasing efficiency – is not something which applies only to Training and Development, all our colleagues in different functions and departments are also being affected by efficiency drives, but often with Training and Development the issue is more acute. Why? Well partly because we didn’t have a lot of resource to start with and secondly because organisations find cutting training a relatively harmless way of achieving savings.

I think our first challenge in training is to wonder why it is that the rest of the business thinks we are so easily dispensable. If, as the conventional perception would have it, training is the first thing to get cut when times are hard, then we really aren’t enabling the business to see the value of what we do. This is partly because proving impact and investment return is difficult – how do we know that a particular business benefit was delivered through the training or that the fact that training was delivered stopped something bad happening? It being difficult, we have fallen back on a kind of metric that says we can deliver the same for less – cutting costs on course delivery or moving face to face courses on- line and claiming cost savings.

The trouble is, efficiency is not simply about reducing costs – it has to be about achieving the same results with fewer resources. Without having proper measures of what the results were in the first place, it becomes particularly hard to say you can achieve the same through a less time intensive or less costly process. As a result the discussion revolves around simple cost reduction – less money spent. To this day, most of the benefit statements around e-Learning talk about cost reduction rather than other benefits and once that becomes the debate, clearly the process will be focused on delivering ever cheaper e-Learning. There is no necessary link between cost and effectiveness of course. Expensive e-Learning is not necessarily better. However, it certainly is the case that the less money spent on e-Learning the more likely it is that it becomes simply communications – content page after content page and nothing that helps people actually learn the content.

Of course if we follow that logic – that training & learning is the same as receiving information then why bother with learning at all? Just ensure everyone has Google access and job done. As Atlantic magazine asked in 2008, “Is Google making us more stupid?” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/

Perhaps information and learning is not the same thing, but if we haven’t given the organisation a reason to believe, then we are going to be cut in favour of communications and information dissemination.
But this is not a terribly helpful debate if you’re facing budget cuts now and still have a learning strategy to deliver.

The Strategic Approach to Efficiency and Effectiveness

So how can you make your limited and perhaps reducing budget go further?
For me, the only effective way is to take a strategic view of your training function. A strategy is simply a process of making choices. The first choice might be the vision for what your training and development function is all about. What does the organisation need and how can you develop the capabilities and competences which will deliver those benefits?
Having developed the vision and a clear understanding of how the learning and development activities will tie in with the organisation’s strategy, the strategic approach is to select the options for how to achieve the required deliverables.

This is where a focus on efficiency really comes into its own. It’s also where we have the opportunity to learn from our other functions where efficiency drives have paid dividends in the past – for example in production and operations where new operating models have delivered significant cost savings over the past years.

One of the key developments delivering significant efficiency gains is agile development. Originally a software development approach, Agile is the process of rapidly responding to changing requirements and adopting processes which allow rapid response to meet customer needs. It is based on shared data and shared networks allowing different functions to communicate quickly and rapidly.

Clearly one of the opportunities within the training and learning arena is the introduction of a Learning Management System. Now in a budget driven, cost reduction article to mention the idea of investing in an LMS is a bit of a disconnect. After all some of them require high six figure if not seven figure investments and represent a major HR project. However, for a purely L&D focused approach there are other alternatives – available on a licence basis or as a relatively small investment and some of them – like our own involve system – packed full of collaboration features as well as tracking and record keeping which can actually reduce overall resource needs, pay for themselves very quickly and add capacity to support a more agile process of delivering the required learning and training.

This ability to track and trace learners also supports two other drivers of efficiency – the eradication of duplication and the creation of a bank of learning resources which can quickly be accessed on a just-in-time basis. Instead of designing a menu of face to face courses accessed on the basis of ‘just in case’ – that is, we’re going to train you how to do something or not do something in case you ever have to deal with it, we can now plan training to match a particular job profile and by dividing your curriculum into a series of short modules can rapidly evolve a course to meet an unanticipated need.

Let me illustrate:
Suppose your Sales team need training in a new product. You can bet your life that the people involved in product development probably forgot to tell you they were developing the product or the details about it were top secret (for which read not yet worked out) and so any training in advance of the product’s release would have been impossible to develop or schedule.
What would be in such a programme?

How about target consumers and how your new product meets the needs of the consumers in your segment and supports the business strategy. This should be there in some form and only require a short refresher and so by being able to tell which members of the target audience have completed the strategy and consumer focus model, you have already removed duplication.

Some sales skills and an approach to selling. Again, as above you would have a record of who had completed which sales programmes and be able to offer a short refresher rather than a whole new programme. Of course for those who haven’t previously completed this module, you can direct them to access to models, the good/bad video clips, and the required standards for a top sales person. All of this will be on-line as a high quality e-Learning piece addressing required knowledge with illustrative videos, the chance to listen to telephone calls and links to key sales tools and resources. You’ve got that already, haven’t you?

The strategic rationale and the key product features. The chances are that all the product information supplied to customers would be all that was required for most sales people. If they need more the chance to see technical specifications, details of how this new product beats the competition and other useful information could be stored in the wiki – easily accessed from your LMS or even built into your LMS.

It won’t have escaped your notice that so far you haven’t required anyone to miss a day of work, to travel to a venue, to be put up overnight or dined (and occasionally wined) on company expense. It may seem a self evident thing to say, but actually a phenomenal 86% of what an organisation spends on training will be to pay people not to be at work while they attend training and to pay for the hire of venues, subsistence and travel. The actual bit spent on course design and delivery pails into insignificance.

However, it isn’t true you can just do away with the expensive face to face element altogether. The focus of our preparatory work will be for those who have completed the pre-work (which you can check through your LMS) to attend a short, intense training workshop where they can reinforce their new product knowledge – actually touch and play with whatever the new thing is – and be inspired about how good it is compared to their consumers’ other options. Of course, if it was just an information exchange, why on earth would you go to the expense of bringing people together? So a smart training team will include a lot of group interaction and some of it will be role playing the sales process with the consumers. Of course, you wouldn’t change the sales processes your organisation follows, so these will be the same materials you already have, adapted to incorporate the new product, its features, consumer benefits and advantages.

Efficiency isn’t about cutting corners
The model that I’ve outlined above is an efficient way of doing things in an organisation. It will pay benefits and reduce resource requirements over time but will also require some investment to enable these benefits to be realised.

It’s not about cutting corners. The idea that one e-learning programme is much the same as any other is not true. A proper blended approach requires each part of the blend to do its job. If you have a workshop (the expensive bit) you want to know that everyone has completed the required pre-learning and that the pre-learning has actually delivered some understanding and knowledge. It is the rare learner and the rare subject where that can be achieved through some kind of dull as ditchwater sub PowerPoint presentation saved to the corporate intranet. It really is a false economy not to invest in proper learning design to ensure that the workshop element (did I tell you it was the expensive bit?) is able to fulfil its role and deliver the value required (especially given that they are so expensive)!
A bove all else, if it’s not effective – it’s never going to be efficient.