May 25th, 2022

8 things to measure

Training & Development

5 min read

As a Learning & Development Lead, driving Pipedrives global initiatives and L&D area, I measure many elements to understand the health of the L&D. I am sharing 8 elements that you too could be measuring and which would create the baseline for understanding your L&D environment.

Doing anything just for the sake of doing, is one of those things that gets me completely frustrated. If you tell me that you have a wonderful new idea but can't offer any context to what hinted to you that there is any need for a change, then that is disappointing. We have so much data around us - let's stop running around without a direction. Look at the data we have, measure things, build the story behind numbers and then choose something to focus on. And just repeat the cycle without the first step of running around aimlessly.

You can't improve what you do not measure.

Where I started

Before setting up L&D team goals, objectives and strategy, I first articulated the benefit or importance of L&D for the organization. We could all guess that most likely the area is impacting employee engagement, but how much exactly? Would you be shocked to hear that lack of L&D opportunities is one of the top reasons for people leaving a company? In fact, career development is the second-most significant driver of employee engagement. And the third most crucial reason for resigning from a job is due to not having opportunities to discuss with your manager about career development, learning and promotion opportunities.

Development opportunities do not only contribute to employability, but 93% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career (LinkedIn Learning Report).

This brings us to our first metric which is employee engagement on "I am aware of possibilities for my career development". A majority of the focus goes to tracking how does the "neutral" or "not aware" proportion change over time.

The promise

My second stop was to review what have we already promised to our employees. Would it be part of your already strategically set employee value preposition or as a small bullet point on your job advertisement, promises are meant to be kept.

For Pipedrive example, room to grow has officially said out as a reason to bring your career to us. We have promised to offer support to develop and learn, and have chances for internal promotions. Therefore the next metrics I track are EVP fulfilment on if pipedrivers think our offering is good in regards to:

  1. Career development opportunities

  2. Learning opportunities

Both are tracked via an employee survey.

One ask before you go

While employee surveys very often bring together the 2 main voices: reluctant stayers - who want to leave, but cannot & enthusiastic stayers - who want to stay and do, therefore you have to balance this information source out with the other side of the coin. As our organization collect anonymous information from our leavers, I use those exit interviews to get data also from enthusiastic leavers. Yes, you should also collect leaving info from reluctant leavers, but as this group is usually forced to leave due to their personal circumstances (family pressure, relocation etc) then the interviews do not offer many insights into improvement points.

Voluntary attrition due to L&D, mostly in form of leavers saying that the main reason for leaving was career opportunities tells us 2 sides: are we lacking in offering career opportunities or are other organizations ahead of us in supporting career growth.

Reaction

Having a small pebble stuck in your shoe and rubbing you the wrong way every time you put the shoe on, is many times more dangerous than having a one-off bad experience with stepping on a huge rock. To be ahead of anyone having issues with a recurring pebble, recurring open surveys, and continuous feedback collection helps you stay alert.

What worked very well for me was establishing a baseline of recurring metrics to track reactions to individual learning events. Therefore for all global learning events that the central L&D team offers to Pipedrivers across our 10 offices, we have a unified logic and approach to ensure the quality.

  1. NPS score on the learning event

  2. The average score on the facilitator and the learning events

Both metrics are tracked on newcomers' onboarding experience on their first week and learning events for general & soft development and leadership development.

Satisfaction blended with skill and self-development self-assessment

Complicated questions mean they can't be receded to a singular numeric value. One of those complicated questions is how well are we doing in regard to leadership development. What makes it complicated is that good leadership is not purely team member satisfaction nor is it only about results. Therefore before going into very detailed tracking we started off keeping our eye on the baseline elements:

  • overall NPS on leadership quality from the point of view of having an inspiring manager;

  • leaders own rating on how well they feel supported in their leadership development by Pipedrive resulting in an NPS score. To top that gathered data we also gather additional contextual information on

    • self-assessment for key skills for different leadership roles;

    • the main barrier points keeping them from fully engaging in the learning process.

If you feel disappointed that I did not give you the magic formula for measuring ROI, promotion rates to leadership or behavioural change, then I am sorry. Yes, I do agree that reactional elements like completion rates and learner drop off rates or learning elements like assessment pass rates and change in performance are valuable. The more measurement points you have, the more data you have to use for making decisions.

Nevertheless, my logic is first to set up the ways to measure the learning environment before jumping into picking the details of individual elements. It is too easy to get lost in minor detail, so instead of focusing on 1 corner of the painting, have a look at the surroundings - it could be many times more telling and help you avoid spending time fixing things that are not the issue.

🔖Read more about measuring learning effectivness from AIHR

Deloitte on employee engagement & learning culture