Using data to make important decisions.
Tips, tricks, and thought leadership to improve impact measurement.
Good morning, afternoon, or evening! It’s Saturday, January 11 and I’m full swing in the ideation and planning for a new impact-focused service I’ll be offering beginning in February! Don’t worry, details will be revealed in due time :)
Now, let’s dive into our resources… Using data to make important decisions!
Make Time for Measurement by Leveraging Automation.
This week’s edition of The Weekly Measure is written by learning operations and microlearning guru, Robyn Defelice, PhD. She is the founder of RADLearning, a boutique consulting firm helping learning teams to fine tune their operations. I credit Robyn and Cognota (a learning operations community and platform) for introducing me to the concept of learning operations.
I feel a bit behind the times that I haven’t considered the concept of learning operations in my 15+ years as an education, L&D, and measurement professional. I’ve always ran my learning team through the lens of a business unit. As a business unit our function was to serve the mission and profit goals of the organization. Thus, my “operations” were primarily focused on the alignment of our activities with driving organizational objectives. While alignment is extremely important, there is much more to learning operations than I previously recognized!
In Robyn’s 20+ years of experience in L&D, she’s found that three important questions are the key to purposeful (and impactful) learning (and using data to make important operational decisions).
Below Robyn shares these three questions and suggestions on how to incorporate this perspective into your own L&D work!
Three Key Questions for Purposeful L&D
In today’s fast-paced business world, L&D professionals must strike a balance between technical skills and the emotional aspects of workforce transformation. But this balance requires more than just effort—it requires clear purpose and effective use of data.
Many of us struggle to design interventions that lead to real behavioral and cultural shifts. Even more of us face challenges in using data to inform important operational decisions that impact our ability to design those interventions. I have been there myself! When faced with these challenges, I can quickly discern my tradeoffs between measuring performance and operations by asking three simple questions: To what end? For what value? For what cost? These questions can help L&D teams balance business impact with operational sustainability.
To What End?
To What End? Every learning initiative needs a clear purpose. To uncover this purpose there are a few different questions you can ask. Start with your business objective, but consider your operational capacity. For example, a safety training program might effectively reduce incidents, but can your team sustain its delivery and updates? Before launching any initiative, map both the desired business outcome and your operational requirements. Will this solution strain or streamline your team's workflow?
What is the ultimate goal of this training?
What is the desired outcome?
How does your initiative support your organization’s strategic objectives?
For What Value?
For What Value? Once you’ve defined the purpose and considered how the program might influence your team’s capacity to deliver the outcomes, it’s time to explore both business and operational impact. To identify business impact, ask this question, “What operational or cultural benefits will result from this intervention?” In the safety training example, the value of fewer workplace injuries includes: reduced costs, improved morale, and higher productivity. These business benefits are important to brainstorm prior to designing and developing your initiative.
In addition to business impact (or benefits) it’s important to consider the operational impact for the L&D team too. Reduced accidents and lower costs are valuable business benefits, however you don’t want to overlook operational impact (this can be both positive and negative). These would be things such as: time spent maintaining content, team capacity for other projects, and scalability of your solution. A program that delivers strong business benefits but consumes excessive maintenance resources might need redesign.
For What Cost?
For What Cost? The final question asks about resources. What is the cost of the intervention, and does it justify the value it delivers? Look beyond initial development costs to total operational investment. A $10,000 microlearning program might save $50,000 in accident costs, but what's the ongoing cost in team hours for updates, technical support, and content management? Consider how automation could help - could templates, reusable content, or systematic workflows reduce long-term operational overhead? For example, microlearning can be a cost-effective way to deliver training at scale, but the investment in development and evaluation must be considered.
Apply to Your Work!
Let’s apply these questions to a real-world scenario. Bee Naturals (BN), a growing company, faces rising workplace accidents due to inadequate training. To address this, the L&D team is considering a microlearning program focused on safety.
To What End? The goal is to reduce accidents by 20% within six months, aligning with BN's broader operational goals of improving productivity and safety. The L&D team determined they could maintain this program with current staffing by repurposing the eLearning content into facilitated microlearning to be used during morning safety huddles. A template to shape the content and activity to guide the floor supervisor was used.
For What Value? The value includes reduced healthcare costs, lower downtime, and improved employee morale. Leading indicators like employee engagement with training, and lagging indicators like accident rates, help measure business value. Operationally, the microlearning format reduces delivery overhead as the authoring tool is a word processing tool and the files can be stored on a shared file drive. This also allows the L&D team to update each safety topic independently, improving their ability to maintain other critical programs.
For What Cost? The L&D team develops a dozen microlearning products for a total cost of $10,000, with an estimated 8 hours per quarter for maintenance and updates. They built reusable templates during development, documented their development process, and prioritized another round of safety topics from the eLearning modules reducing future creation time by 40%. The anticipated ROI includes both savings from reduced workdays lost due to injury and increased L&D team capacity through efficient content management.
To apply this to your own work, pick one initiative and evaluate it through both lenses of impact: business and operations. Does it deliver business results while maintaining operational efficiency? Are you measuring both types of impact? Could adjustments to your learning operations make it more sustainable?
Thank you for reading all the way down! Let us know what you think of this week’s resources! Inspiration and improvement is our goal here at The Weekly Measure :)
See you in your inbox next weekend!
~ Dr. Alaina
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