One of the most vexing challenges in completing a Baldrige assessment is showing meaningful results for workforce and leader development. Most organizations can show the percent of employees who received a certain type of training. Many can summarize data from surveys of people who completed specific training. A few can provide hours of training per employee.

Very few can identify results that show how effective their training is.

The Baldrige Criteria ask how you “evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of your learning and development systems.” Examiners expect to find measures of effectiveness and efficiency, the results of which should appear in Item 7.4. Not many organizations have a good answer for the question or relevant data to put in the Results section.

In “Putting a value on training” (McKinsey Quarterly, July 2010), Jenny Cermak and Monica McGurk explain why this data is so important, noting that “90% of respondents to a McKinsey Quarterly survey said that building capabilities was a top-ten priority for their organizations. Only a quarter, though, said that their programs are effective at improving performance measurably, and only 8% track the program’s return on investment.”

At a time when building capabilities in existing employees is critical but the resources to do that are limited, training must be proven to be effective.

They use the Boys & Girls Club to illustrate how this can be done. To summarize the case study, the BGCA was facing a shortage of leadership capabilities. It did a 360-degree assessment of every local leader to correlate each aspect of leadership with key performance measures and found four that contributed disproportionately to performance. It built a training program around these four aspects. To measure training effectiveness, they compared pre- and post-training results. They also compared post-training results against those of a control set of organizations with similar characteristics.

The data showed that the locations with leaders who had been trained outperformed the control group on ever performance measure. BGCA determined that the training generated more than a fourfold return on its costs.

Further analysis showed “that the gains of participants in the highest quartile were three to five times the average.” BGCA refined the training to reinforce these participants’ success factors.

As the authors concluded, “picking the right metrics is the key to creating real value from training”—the kind of value that justifies the cost of the training by improving the organization’s performance.

To read more about building employee capabilities, click on these articles:

• Not Ready for Work…and What You Can Do About It
• World-Class Employee Orientation
• Recruiting, Retaining, and Engaging
• Employee Development and 10,000 Hours of Practice

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