Love, Work & ROI at ATD2018: Session Overviews from Lambda Solutions

Team Zoola Analytics continues to have many great discussions and demos at our stand #1027 with the Totara team at ATD International Conference & Exposition. Do stop by! Stewart Rogers, our VP of Product, continues to  recap sessions for you today.

GS 2 - Love + Work - Marcus Buckingham

Marcus Buckingham is the Founder of the Strengths Revolution and Head of ADP Research Institute, People + Performance. In this session, Markus discussed how excellence from your people is driven by love and that you can interweave LOVE + WORK so that your teams, your company and the world can experience the full impact of your people performing at their best.

Key Takeaways:

• Why do we in talent development focus so much on the "work" part instead of the "love" and why do our systems seem designed to round out sharp edges and homogenize unique strengths?We believe the opposite of bad is good and therefore we study the bad to do the opposite. However, we don't end up with good, we end up with not bad.
• To get better, study what works "Excellence has its own pattern."
• Interesting insight on performance reviews due to the reviewers idiosyncrasies bias, and therefore the performance reviews are flawed and 360 reviews are “more bad.”
• There is growing research that this is true = starting with Markus’ Harvard Business Review article, Reinventing Performance Rankings.

Nine Lies about Work

1. 1. People care which company they work for
2. 2. The best plan wins
3. 3. The best companies cascade goals
4. 4. Well rounded people are better
5. 5. People crave feedback
6. 6. People can reliably rate other people
7. 7. People have potential
8. 8. We should seek work/life balance
9. 9. "Leadership" is a thing

Stewart’s take on this session: You learn and grow and develop the most where you already have some comparative advantage. Personalize your learning to so that Humans can most effectively, and more importantly, can passionately learn, grow and follow their #redthreads.

Panel Measuring the Impact and ROI of Soft Skills Programs - Panel Session

A panel of four experts led this session discussing how soft skills, such as leadership development, communication, and team collaboration, must drive business value and deliver a positive return on investment (ROI). They described the trend of building and evaluating soft skills with actual case studies—showing a clear path to designing, developing and executing programs that deliver business value.

Key Takeaways:

• ATD and ROI Institute surveys suggest that Impact and ROI are the most important data points that CEOs want from their talent investment. However in 2010, only 4% are measuring ROI and 8% measuring Impact.
• In 2015, Measurement and Matrics Study by CLO suggest that 35% are or plan to measure Impact and 21 are planning to measure ROI.
• Soft skill intangible benefits: improved teamwork, customer service, communication, increased commitment and job satisfaction.
• Verizon reports that having manager support for training results in an ROI of training was 147% and without manager support, 38%.

Overall, this session gave good reinforcement about why L&D needs to measure learning effectiveness, all the way from Reaction to Impact and ROI. The session gave insight into the overall results leading organizations like Verizon and VMWare experienced.

Click here for slides of this presentation. A great supporting article is also here for reference: ROI Calculations for Technology Based Learning.

Stewart’s take on this session: While L&D need to be able to demonstrate the baseline metrics, the "inputs and indicators," measuring learning effectiveness has to evolve to a science to demonstrate the impact and ROI of the programs you deliver. However, as noted in President Obama’s keynote, change is hard and takes time and this applies to measuring learning effectiveness—there is no magic pill that will do this for you.

Getting enough ROI from your learning programs? Stop by stand #1027 at ATD2018 and our team will show you how easy it is, with a few clicks of the mouse, to present your C-suite with visual dashboards and reports that measure ROI on learning investments with Zoola Analytics.