Evaluating My Impact as an ID
Recently I attended a webinar hosted by the ROI Institute and it got me thinking about my evaluation strategy.
I work in Learning & Development within the customer service arm of a large financial services firm.
This means there is a really easy way to evaluate the effectiveness of my learning solutions. I need to answer this one question:
Are employees handling customer requests accurately?
This leads to more nuanced questions such as:
What mistakes are most commonly made when engaged in this work type?
When an employee gets stuck, where do they go for help?
What these questions reveal is that when trying to measure performance accuracy, quality data is my friend. I want to see at what level of accuracy employees are performing BEFORE going through the course I developed, how they are doing during the reinforcement period right after training, and if they maintain successful levels further down the line.
There are other success factors to measure, like did we save the business time or money, but that information can be extracted from our core question about whether or not employees are doing their job with precision. Speed doesn't matter if employees are sloppy with their work or skipping steps. Money saved through our upskilling offerings can be lost down the line if mistakes are made and corrections need to be implemented.
To get at the heart of the issue, we need to take Cathy Moore's advice and consider exactly what employees need to do. That's what you measure for impact! And in my case, employees need to handle customer requests accurately.
This is how we show our utility as instructional designers and earn our seat at the table. We aren’t helpers in the wing, waiting to take orders. Instructional designers have agency and positively contribute to business outcomes.
