organizational development

Organizations worldwide spend well in excess of a hundred billion dollars per year on employee training and development, and countless more on other forms of learning.

Given this spending level, organizations should be asking some very pragmatic questions:

• For the level we invest in learning, do we have the best trained, most capable workforce possible?
• Are our learning initiatives providing us with a competitive advantage in the marketplace and impacting our bottom-line?

Taking very pragmatic actions:

• Focus on improving major business processes. Most organizations focus learning initiatives on building individual employee skills. New skills are a goal - but not the place to start. Look first at the performance and change requirements of key business processes, and then incorporate learning efforts into process improvement programs. You'll see the business results of learning - and skills development in the process.
• Set goals. Few companies have a good handle on how readily they learn or how effectively they employ the information into the daily operations. They lack the baseline and benchmarks against which to set goals for improving the learning process. Assess your learning capabilities and compare them with the capabilities of high-performing/high impact organizations. Then assess the learning needs of the organization, establish targets, and launch programs.
• Keep score. To operationalize organizational learning, you must measure it. Develop a "learning scorecard" to track and communicate the impact of learning initiatives, the performance and progress of learning processes and systems, and the effects of learning on employee skills, performance and retention. Track best practice sharing and, insofar as possible, speed and effectiveness of decision making.