Graham Borley presents a case study which illustrates how important it is to carry out regular evaluations of training strategies, using insurance group Aviva as an example.
The ability of an organisation to identify and develop talent is often cited as one of the key requirements for future success. In this quest, businesses will frequently invest significant amounts of money and resources to provide developmental support without really knowing that it is aimed at the right target or delivering the desired improvements.
This prompts key questions, one of which is: If it is the norm for businesses to invest a significant percentage of their wealth to develop their key talent, why do they place so little emphasis on determining if the investment has made a return?
There is little argument about the value of the evaluation process, so the answer must lie more with the organisation’s ability to manage the investigation process or the feeling that the process is time consuming, complicated to calculate and not likely to provide really useful information.
Resistance is also fuelled by the feeling that if the business isn’t asking for this, why go through the pain of doing it; especially if there is a risk that the results might be less than complimentary.
Even so, a growing number of companies are introducing regular evaluations into their annual training strategy, with many engaging independent specialists. One specialist training evaluation consultancy is The Talent Management Business (TTMB), which aims to provide companies with an insight into the impact of their training interventions and take some of the guess work out of learning needs analysis. They suggest two levels of evaluation for training and development interventions:
1. ROE: Return on Expectation
This level of evaluation will indicate how successful the intervention has been at delivering the expected behavioural change detailed in the learning objectives of the programme (i.e. enhanced attitude, skills or knowledge).
2. ROI: Return on Investment
In addition to determining the ROE for the intervention, this more in-depth evaluation will seek to determine the associated business improvement and assign it a financial value.
This brief case study outlines the reasons why, and the approach taken by insurance company Aviva, to evaluate two of it’s senior management development programmes.
Evaluating the impact of leadership development at Aviva
Aviva is the world’s 5th largest insurance group and the biggest in the UK. It is the leading provider of life and pension products in the UK and has significant businesses around the world employing 59,000 people worldwide.
Senior management development is taken very seriously with programmes frequently lasting several months, including overseas assignments, coaching and residential periods at some of the most prestigious business schools in Europe. Feedback from candidates about these programmes has invariably been good and there continues to be a strong demand for places on these aspirational programmes.
Working from this position of strength the training and development team at Aviva are not prepared to rest on their laurels, constantly seeking to find ways to further improve their training offering. They took the decision to take an independent second opinion and engaged The Talent Management Business (TTMB) on the project. The decision to use an independent company for this review was not taken lightly. The training team weighed up the pros and cons of undertaking the review themselves or engaging one of their development partners who were helping to deliver the training. The decision to engage TTMB was based upon the need for a truly independent and unattached review and, because they offered a depth of knowledge and experience in this field that marked them real specialists in this field.
The key objective of the review was to understand how successful the leadership development programmes had been in delivering the desired learning outcomes and to uncover ways in which future programmes might be improved. The Training Audit Company used a variety of investigative techniques to produce a structured report that was framed using the Kirkpatrick/Phillips model.
The GDP programme was one of the first targets for the evaluation focus. “The evaluation enabled us to show that the GDP programme produced a direct return on investment (ROI),” says Adam Eaton, the group director of management development. “Showing a tangible business benefit for the development programme is very powerful when talking to line managers.”
Organisations are usually pleased to discover that their training interventions have produced a financial improvement for the business that is greater than the outlay on the activity. In this case, the review found a positive return on investment with an ROI ratio greater than 14:1 for some candidates. The research also identified that in the case of the GDP programme, coaching was the most significant contributor to enhanced performance.
A subsequent review of the Leadership In Action (LIA) programme similarly revealed that not only was the programme greatly appreciated by candidates, it was also meeting its ROE targets by delivering to its development goals. However, much of the benefit of the evaluation process is that it can provide a view on where improvements and cost savings might be achieved.
In these instances, the evaluation of training and development programmes provided Aviva with:
- An independent review that informed and confirmed the opinions held by the training team
- An insight into the strengths of the programmes plus a series of suggestions that could improve the quality of the programme and reduce costs
- An evaluation about how well the programme is delivering to its learning objectives (ROE) and how strongly these are supporting business growth (ROI)
Aviva is a strong advocate of the evaluation of its training and development programmes. “We believe that it is smart to conduct a detailed evaluation of key development programmes on a regular basis. This rationale allows us to ensure that the quality of the programmes is maintained and matched to the learning needs of our managers,” says Eaton.
Sue Dines, head of talent management at Aviva Group, adds that “the evaluations have provided insight that has allowed us to enhance the learning impact as well as manage costs. This means that the evaluation itself produces an ROI as well as an invaluable source of business intelligence”.
Graham Borley is from The Talent Management Business
