Performance SF 2000

LEARNING & PERFORMANCE SUPPORT:
BEST PRACTICES AND LESSONS LEARNED

Harold D. Stolovitch

What is happening in large corporations today with respect to learning and support practices? There is the hype, then there are the facts and lessons learned. This article summarizes major findings of a study HSA completed in March 2000 to discover current best practices in leading companies and what they have learned from their initiatives and efforts. With all the enthusiastic promotion taking place in Human Performance Improvement, performance consultants and learning specialists require solid information to help their organizations make appropriate decisions.

The Learning and Performance Support Best Practices Study: Key Findings
Working with an automotive company, HSA conducted a four-month study on learning and performance support that drew on data from almost 400 large North American companies. It involved a review of major literature databases, an examination of internal documentation and detailed interviews with key persons responsible for learning and performance support in fourteen organizations. Five critical findings are:

Support: Companies that have transformed their training departments into learning and performance support organizations have had the greatest success in obtaining outstanding results from employees. When comparing companies that strongly support their people with those that are low supporters, over a 10-year period, findings show that sales growth is more than twice as high; profits, four times higher; profit margins, double; and share earnings, more than double.

Performance orientation: Business success is most likely to occur when organizations adopt a performance orientation. Business results improve when interventions are performance- based and focused on development and support of competencies directly linked to business-valued accomplishments.

Strategic role: Those responsible for training have a greater strategic role to play than most organizations realize. Their impact on the bottom line increases when they are involved early in strategic decision-making, attend executive business meetings and are tasked with strategically important roles.

Transfer: Training represents too narrow a focus to achieve desired human performance results. The research literature and the experience of most of the companies studied clearly reveal low transfer rates from training alone to on-job application (typical range is 10% to 30% with most on the lower end).

Evaluation: Measurement and evaluation is key to attaining successful performance results. All projects and interventions require criteria for success and must be verified in concrete, meaningful ways to demonstrate, tangibly, value to stakeholders.

Additional Study Findings
The study also offers eleven additional findings:

Vision: Companies that have achieved remarkable results from those tasked with learning and performance improvement responsibilities have clearly created a vision much greater than training. They expect verifiable performance results, tied to business objectives and integrated into strategic business decision- making.

Practice: Successful learning and performance teams operate as internal consulting firms, identifying customers, assessing needs, and providing measurable value.

Focus: Concretely, companies with documented best practices in learning and performance have clearly defined their focus: achieving, through people, measurable results desired by all stakeholders in the enterprise.

Partnership: In best practices organizations, there is a close relationship between the learning and performance support services team and the customer bases. There is a partnership and a common purpose of meeting business needs in mutually beneficial ways.

Processes: High performing learning and performance support groups standardize and adhere to clearly defined processes for analyzing and solving performance problems. Loosening of standards decreases results.

Measures: Leading companies have instituted measures of performance as the only reliable means to identify what requires improvement and what constitutes success. Measures range from learning results and certifications to return on investment.

Knowledge management: Leading companies have invested heavily in building knowledge management systems and transforming themselves into learning organizations. Infrastructures and a sharing culture are essential for success.

Technology: The overall trend among leading companies with respect to learning and performance support is toward greater use of technology. However, the key discriminator between leading companies and others appears not to be in the amount of technology used for learning and performance support, but in the wisdom with which it is applied.

Diversity: A critical condition for establishing a culture that is performance oriented is the emphasis placed on the importance of people and their unique contributions to success. Leading companies understand that different individuals and groups operate under extremely different conditions and with varying motives. They take into account differences of characteristics and goals and build support systems to respond to this diversity.

Adult learning: Leading companies consider who the learners and performers are, what they perceive as their needs and create user-friendly support mechanisms for application to the job. They emphasize benefits to the learners/performers, identify what will be accomplished through time and effort investment, provide practice opportunities and integrate non-threatening testing and feedback mechanisms to help individuals improve or to confirm success.

Study Conclusions
The best practices study provides a portrait of what leading companies are doing and have learned with respect to learning and performance support that makes them different from other, less successful ones. Four conclusions emerge from the study: ·

No single company does everything well. However, all do a few things extremely well and tend to avoid practices that excessively waste resources or depress performance.
To contribute significantly to business success, training groups must transform themselves into learning and performance support organizations.
Use of technology to improve learning and performance requires wisdom and a clear understanding of the characteristics of both learners/performers and technology. The starting place is the human performer not the technology.
All players responsible for performance outcomes must share a common vision and operate as a team. High performance results emerge from the synergy of mutually interrelated initiatives that complement and support one another.