You’ve determined that training is one of your key needs to move D&I (diversity and inclusiveness) forward in your organization and now is the time to start. You’ve identified a training partner who’s a professional with adult learning, training design and facilitation expertise. They are experts in D&I who possess first-hand management experience and a list of measurable successes. Their training design increases awareness, knowledge, and skills and is accessible to a variety of learning and personality styles. They know your organization and industry well and are equipped to help you manage conflict and change.
Congratulations! This is an accomplishment worthy of celebration! However, your return on investment from training, even when delivered by seasoned experts with an excellent design, will still be limited if you’re not reinforcing what happened in the workshop back in the office. Also, if you never measure the effects of a training program on participants’ performance or behaviors, how will you know whether it made a difference? If you do neither of these, not only will it look like the organization just wasted its money, people may conclude that D&I training doesn’t work. This will have a chilling effect on any future D&I efforts.
It’s a false belief, even among some training professionals, that the effects of training can’t be measured. This belief undermines the credibility of D&I initiatives and professionals, and reflects poor stewardship of an organization’s financial investment and trust.
To ensure meaningful training impact, ask yourself:
- What are the specific goals, or learning objectives for the training? What exactly should people feel, think, and/or be able to do differently by the end of the training?
- What is our baseline? Where are we now in relation to our training goals? Assess individual participants using a pre-test or self-evaluation before, or at the beginning of, training. Also, assess the entire organization using relevant customer or employee satisfaction scores, quality metrics, market share, and/or financial indicators.
- How will we know whether or not this training was a success? Again, this may be measured for individuals using a post-test and/or self-evaluation at the end of the training. Use the same instrument pre- and post-training and compare results. To assess organizational impact, revisit the same metrics you used to identify your baseline.
- Results of training effectiveness should be measured by quantitative means (numbers, such as a 1-5 Likert rating scale) and qualitative means (words). People reporting they can have difficult conversations more easily, trust their bosses, or feel more confident with customers are all valid measures. Secondhand stories of people doing new behaviors that get better results are also excellent qualitative measures. The most powerful communication of training success includes numbers and stories.
- Use as many of the Kirkpatrick Four Levels of Learning Evaluation as possible to determine training success. Seasoned training professionals will not only know what these are, but how to use them. They track whether learning, new behaviors, and results continue to emerge over time, beyond how training participants felt at the end of a workshop.
Using the Kirkpatrick Levels also challenges the other false belief that training is a standalone solution to a learning and skills gap. New knowledge, behaviors, and habits only take hold through repetition and reinforcement outside the workshop.
To ensure long-term high return on training, ask:
- Who will we train, and when? How will we manage lack of critical mass in the early stages? If you only train your leaders or your individual contributors, there will be a disconnect between them on vocabulary, concepts, and skills. Until a critical mass of people have been through training, there will be a disconnect between those who have the new knowledge and skills and those who don’t. This makes it more difficult for the people trained early to practice their new skills and be held accountable to high standards. Ensure adequate support for the first wave of trainees.
- How are new awareness, knowledge, and skills being reinforced? If systems, processes, and leaders’ behaviors don’t support and reinforce the learning, it will quickly fall by the wayside. Some estimate we forget up to 90 percent of what we learn in training one to four weeks afterwards! If there aren’t immediate opportunities to apply the knowledge and practice the skills, or frequent reminders—such as e-mails, visuals to look at, meaningful mention in meetings—the learning disintegrates. If there aren’t consequences—positive ones for doing new behaviors, and negative ones for doing the old—nothing will change. Henry Ford famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and it’s true.
- What are the obstacles to this awareness, knowledge, and skills being reinforced and embedded in our culture? If you have organizational habits, leadership behaviors, policies, or processes that not only don’t reinforce, but contradict, disrupt, or impede the use of new knowledge and behaviors, your progress will be minimal. Identify those and change them before training starts.
Ensure both training effectiveness and the return on your training investment are high through careful preparation before anyone attends a workshop. Take the time to put reinforcement structures and accountability systems in place, and communicate the plans to all involved before sending people to training. You’ll be happy you did!
Excerpt from “5 Reasons Your Diversity Initiative Is Doomed (That No One Else Will Tell You)” by Susana Rinderle.
Susana Rinderle, MA, ACC, is a trainer, coach, facilitator, author, TEDx speaker and President of Susana Rinderle Consulting, LLC. Based in Los Angeles with 25 years of experience, she helps leaders and organizations solve a pressing problem or go from good to great through the power of inclusive leadership and effective communication. Visit http://susanarinderle.com for more information. #NewSchoolDandI
