Document Your Training Success

Credit Union Magazine
April 21, 2009 | COMMENTS

Say you decide to adopt a fitness program. What would be your first step? Throw out all of the junk food? Run a mile around the local high school track? No. You'd probably begin by determining what you most want to accomplish—improve your strength? Endurance? Health?

Next, you'd set some short- and long-term targets for yourself based on current fitness factors. Otherwise, how would you find the motivation to continue and how would you know whether eating grapefruit or lifting weights were getting you somewhere?

Many organizations implement training initiatives without first taking some of these same steps that will allow them to document their progress. Sometimes it's because they fear it will be too complicated, involve a lot of paperwork, or because they don't have sophisticated tracking systems. There's also the fear of failure: "If I don't measure, I won't be disappointed if I don't see results."

The good news is that tracking and measuring success doesn't have to be a system-driven or paper-intensive process. With a few simple focal points to track, you can assess the impact of your training efforts easily and consistently. There are two important aspects to measure:

1. The extent to which employees are engaging in new behaviors and strategies; and
2. The results of those efforts.

The former is called "leading indicators," performance measures that predict future performance (i.e., a sales activity such as a contact or appointment). The latter, measuring results, involves tracking "lagging indicators," traditional performance measures (i.e., revenue generated in a product category, number of accounts opened, etc.).

It's not necessary to measure everything. In fact, studies show that measuring and focusing on more than three leading and three lagging indicators dilutes the effort and frustrates employees. A narrow target against which to apply new behaviors is key.

An example of this might be a target of fitting into a specific pair of jeans, as opposed to occasionally trying on every pair of pants in your closet to see which fit. Maintaining focus on a narrow target keeps energy and motivation high and makes success more likely.

Establish and Track Key Measures

Here are some tips for establishing and tracking key measures:

• Select three leading indicators by asking questions such as, what does success look like behaviorally (i.e., asking good open ended questions, empathizing, and handling objections)? What activities would I like to see employees engage in (i.e., service follow up calls, resolving member problems, making referrals, and coaching)?
• Select three lagging indicators by reviewing your mission, vision, and goals, and selecting the three areas you can impact or you believe needs the biggest boost (i.e., opening more share draft accounts or getting more referrals).
• Create a chart to measure these indicators and hang it in a central location in each branch where everyone can see it.
• Build accountability by encouraging employees to individually track their own leading indicators, and post these and lagging indicator results weekly.
• Review leading and lagging indicator results weekly, and identify opportunities to coach your people based on how well they're demonstrating new behaviors and getting results.
• Look for the trends in your data: Are activity levels increasing? How does that correlate to improvements in skill use? Results?
• Document success stories and broadcast them to the organization (i.e., share best practices or success stories in your credit union newsletter).
• Track feedback from your members. Establish a suggestion box or nomination form for exceptional service that members can fill out and submit.
• Announce winners and post them in the branch for staff and members to see.

By starting with a few, well-selected measures, you can begin to connect what people are doing to the results they're achieving. You'll answer the fundamental evaluative questions of "are they using it?" and "is it working and yielding value for the credit union?" The answers will provide you with good direction for implementing next steps, follow-up training, skills reinforcement, and coaching.

This story first appeared at www.creditunionmagazine.com and is reprinted with permission.