High-end HR practices.

At one extreme, it is found high-involvement HR that incorporates flexible job design, ongoing training in skills and problem-solving, information-sharing, work teams, pay-for-performance plans, employment security, and extensive employee screening. She and her team found that the higher an organization operates on the HR innovation scale, the higher the productivity gain compared to traditional HR and training practices. Gains translated into as much as 6.7% more “uptime”. Average mill uptime is about 88%, if innovative HR and training practices add 6.7% to that, uptime rises to 94.7%, a substantial gain.

What’s the secret?

The challenge, of course, is to determine the set of HR and training practices that will fit with your organization. Companies identified in the Accenture workforce productivity study as “human performance leaders” have different results and “exhibit a number of characteristics shared by high-performance businesses.”

What makes them different?

They use technology more effectively to support training functions (55% of performance leaders compared with 28% of non-leaders said they use technology to support training well or exceptionally well). In addition, leaders use comprehensive and continuous measures to understand the link between HR and training investments and business results, Accenture found. Sample measures: Time to competence, manager proficiency, leadership capability, and workforce proficiency.

Training has work to do.

In its year-long study of 244 executives in six countries, Accenture found that companies that fall short on superior workforce and organizational excellence attribute their failures in most cases to underperforming HR and training departments. Having identified the five most important training initiatives, only 16% said they are very satisfied with their progress in accomplishing them. In fact, respondents are less than fully satisfied with training or with HR organizations as a whole: only 18% of executives said they are very satisfied with HR performance.

Top Five Training Initiatives:

1. Aligning learning strategy with business goals.
2. Ensuring that learning content meets workforce requirements.
3. Boosting workforce productivity and agility.
4. Measuring the learning function against business objectives.
5. Improving the efficiency of training operations.

Three Quick and Easy Ways to Gauge Your Training Outcomes

No training manager with a pulse is unaware of the emphasis on measuring the effectiveness of training programs. In some organizations, it’s ROI or die. In others, you get no funding for training and development unless you show a positive outcome or return on investment. The American Society for Training & Development (ASTD;
Alexandria, Va.) even has a separate organization, the ROI Network, devoted to this urgent topic (www.astd.org/ASTD/education/roi_network/roi_home.htm).
In truth, many training managers are hard pressed to undertake the lengthy and challenging process of an in-depth ROI analysis. Some barely have the funding for training programs, let alone an ROI study (about 5% of the program budget, according
to Jack Phillips, the reigning authority on training ROI (see Jack Phillips Center for Research, a division of FranklinCovey; roiresearch@mindspring.com).

What to do?

Several relatively quick and easy methods can measure the outcome of training without a full ROI study. Here are one:

Take control.

This is the quickest and easiest way to measure what effect training has had on a given group: Train a group of 20 or so employees on a given task, say on-the-job safety. Then compare their performance results to those of a control group that hasn’t received the training. The split-sample approach is a favorite of HR metrics maestro, John Sullivan, Ph.D. (www.drjohnsullivan.com), professor at San Francisco State University and member of the Human Capital Metrics Consortium. Sullivan believes training produces the highest ROI of human resource initiatives and that proving that is as simple as the split sample described above. You can use this method to measure results among plants (train everyone at one plant and provide no training at another; then compare the results).

Martin Sage, the founder of Sage Innovations was addressing his audience on day one of the month-long high-performance training seminar for leaders. His audience of about 25 people, from all age groups: "Your assignment is to write, direct and perform in one or more Broadway shows, to design a marketing strategy for these shows AND to sell tickets. At the same time, you will learn the fundamentals of business management, and break your old bad habits that previously kept you from earning money. AND," Sage thundered on, "you will have FUN!" "In the next month," he went on, almost shouting now, "I'm going to push you through your fears and resistance and force you to live the way you want to live ... and that means SERVICE SELLING!" Sage explained on day two of the seminar and I soon realized what that meant. Whether I cleaned toilets in the theatre, sold tickets, sang on stage or had my picture taken in a limousine, it was all the same thing. It was fun, if I made it so. If I was having fun, I could mostly anything. Through the Sage Learning Method, all of the participants were coached into striving to reach their desires. As long as we were all working in our peak performance as a team, and going toward a specific goal, no task was impossible, and it was usually fun. Based on a concept developed from both Systems Theory and Learning Theory, the Sage Learning Method is the foundation for the training. "When people work together on a project, with each person performing tasks that light them up, other problems which normally occur in systems disappear."

Sage, who has a Masters in Psychology and has completed doctoral course work in psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi, explained the pertinence of entrepreneur leadership training for today's business environment. "In the old economy, most people worked at careers that failed to bring out their aliveness because they simply took the path of convenience and chance. We filled whatever job slots were available. In the new style of entrepreneurship, we use our own special intelligence to carve out a market niche in the arena where we naturally excel."

As a result of the training, several people opted to move to New York and start their own businesses, including me. I now live a life full of excitement and challenge, a life that I have been dreaming about and have known that I was capable of, since a very young age. Not only that, I have confidence in my ability as a business-owner and sales-woman. With those two things, I have the most important tools to create a fabulous life. Over 300 business coaches have attended a 4-year leadership training program at Sage University, and more than 20,000 people have taken part in Sage's seminars all over the world. "Beneath the surface facade we all show lies a warm,
brilliant individual. Our job as coaches is to question and probe until the social mask falls away. As people relax into their authentic selves, it becomes possible to connect their curiosity and creativity to the career that is best suited to them." — Martin Sage