You’ve found that money. You’ve boosted your employees’ morale. But how has the training your employees participated in affected your bottom line?
The Human Capital Institute estimates that it can take more than six months for a new employee to make enough of a contribution to your business to break even on the training that you’ve invested in them.
Measuring the ROI on employee training can be hard to quantify. When everyone learns and retains information differently. So what’s a fair way to see if your investment is paying back?
1. Track Hours and Tasks
Work logs are a great way to measure how training has affected employees in their day-to-day tasks. The logs can be as simple or as complicated as you want. And there are many online tools that can help. Once your employees are feeding back information you can assess if that sales seminar helped convert more sales, or if that tax webinar has helped increase the number of invoices sent out.
2. Ask Your Staff to Appraise Themselves
After training, ask your employees to provide feedback on what they felt they learned and how they will apply it. Don’t forget to ask what they felt didn’t work or apply to their job role. Then schedule a follow up appraisal a few months later to see how they’ve applied the training in their daily work routine.
3. Team Appraisals
Team performance appraisals assess an individual’s contribution to the team. They assess whether the team met its goals, produced a quality product and worked well together. You can choose to do this as a team, in your meetings, or with 360 feedback from all members.
4. Qualitative Assessments Through Observation
Although increased performance is great for the bottom line. You also want to check HOW a task is performed: how your employee handles a crisis; how effectively they complete a task; their customer service or demeanor.
In this case, the best assessment is observation. The tricky part is making sure your employee doesn’t see you observing their actions, and in turn alter their behavior. This is where ‘secret shoppers’ and customer feedback can be useful for customer facing roles.
Financial Help for Training Employees
Now you have concluded that your training had a good ROI, it’s time to look at booking the next session. And the Canada-B.C. Job Grant could help.
You could qualify for up to two-thirds of employee training costs (a maximum of $10,000) for each employee trained per fiscal year. And if you are expanding your team and employing a previously unemployed person, you could be eligible to be reimbursed for 100 per cent of the training costs, up to a maximum of $15,000 per fiscal year, for that employee.
