Attractive pay and job expectations aren’t the only things that matter when trying to hire top talent. The modern employee wants to work somewhere where people are friendly and helpful. They also want to know that you care about them in the long run.
It’s not surprising, then, that many businesses choose to invest in employee upskilling and training to improve the workplace experience.
The only question is: how can they measure the return?
We’ll talk about this in more depth and help you make a plan for figuring out if your upskilling efforts are paying off.
Understanding Employee Upskilling—Why Is It Important?
83 percent of global workers want to be more effective in their jobs and think that upskilling will help them do that.
Upskilling could mean learning a new simple task or something more complex, like teaching your sales team to use power dialler software.
Smart leaders train and upskill employees to enter new roles instead of wasting time and resources hiring new people. Because they have an idea of how things work, your current employees can pick up new skills faster.
By improving workers’ skills and helping them learn new ones, your team will be able to adapt to changes. Upskilling your employees makes them more effective and helps your business boost revenue. It also helps build an organizational culture that is receptive to innovation, whatever its nature, from introducing AI to a contact center, to introducing .ai to your website, from Only Domains.
Here’s a rundown of the benefits of employee upskilling.
- Improved job performance
- Increased productivity
- Enhanced employee satisfaction and morale
- Reduced employee turnover
- Better adaptability to technological advancements
- Enhanced company competitiveness
- Strengthened employee loyalty and retention
- More efficient use of resources
- Increased innovation and creativity
- Smooth succession planning
- Reduced skills gaps
- Higher employee engagement
Why Should You Measure Employee Upskilling ROI?
Upskilling employees can be expensive. So it makes sense to want to know if spending that much on training is worth it. That’s why it’s important to track the ROI of employee upskilling.
It’s particularly important to understand the ROI of training programs to get more funding and support from leadership across the company or from stakeholders. When departmental and unit leaders know that training workers can pay off in a big way, they are more likely to support the budget investment. They will also make it a top priority to help their groups participate in the program.
The purpose of measuring employee upskilling ROI is to determine:
- If employees learn new information and skills that will help them work more efficiently
- If you can figure out how much training will cost and how much it will help each person and the organization
ROI clearly shows if a training course is worth the money. You can also use it to compare one training course to another and help establish a regular training structure.
How to Measure the ROI of Employee Upskilling
Here are some ways to measure the impact of your upskilling and training initiatives:
Track Productivity
Training often aims for higher productivity, but it can be hard to measure. Choose a specific indicator to track to get more exact numbers. Tracking specific indicators related to improved performance helps quantify the impact of employee training. For example, an insurance business that trains its employees to use AI-driven projects could track a decrease in the time it takes to settle a claim.
Monitor Resource Implementation and Usage
It’s important to invest in new practices and technology, but they’re only useful if your team can use them. If you teach employees how to use new technology, like remote desktop manager tools for remote work, keep track of how much they use it after the training is done.
Study New Skill Development
The best way to find out if a program is working to improve employees’ skills is to test those skills. Track the skills of each employee before and after they participate in a training program to see how it affects them as individuals. Also, measure how it affects the overall skill set of the workforce.
Measure Employee Engagement
Engagement is a key measure of ROI when you consider that only 23 percent of the global workforce feels engaged.
When you’re actively investing in their growth and skill development, employees become more engaged and committed to their work. This boosts their profitability and overall organizational success. You can measure engagement levels with employee engagement surveys. Innovative tools such as voice analytics can also play a role in measuring engagement by analyzing the tone and sentiment of employee interactions during training sessions.
To enhance employee engagement further, consider implementing employee engagement tips and strategies within your upskilling programs. This can contribute to a more significant impact on ROI.
Track Revenue Growth
To figure out how much a training program affects revenue, it’s important to link the results directly to the program. For example, you could measure changes in revenue from particular departments, such as an HR team that has just learned how to use volume hiring to scale your business.
Measure Employee Retention
Your ability to retain employees is another crucial measure of employee upskilling ROI. Employees are more likely to stay with a company that invests in their growth and development.
So measure your retention rates before and after starting your upskilling initiative. You should see increased retention as a big win because losing employees costs money, lowers morale, and often creates skill gaps.
Track Your Profit Margins
Building skills in-house can help you save on costs by reducing the need for external resources or vendors. This positively affects profit margins, employee experience, and organizational efficiency.
Keep Tabs on Innovation
Even though it might seem hard to track the wide-ranging influence of innovation, reskilling, and upskilling can be closely linked to innovations in some areas. For instance, what a call center’s employees learn in a training program could directly lead to a new method of customer interaction or to some insights using real time speech analytics.
Make the Smart Move
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of employee training and upskilling takes some work. Employee upskilling programs can cost a huge amount and can make or break your business. But, once you know what works and what to adjust, you can invest your money where it will have the largest impact on both your employees and the business as a whole.
