Why Companies Perform Best with Performance-Based Training
Better performance is always the intended outcome of learning. Alternatively, there can be no learning without actions. We perform some actions, thus we learn. When it comes to employee performance, we talk about actions that drive business results through the effective use of time, knowledge, skills, technology and other resources. Reaching full potential is almost impossible without proper training and the experience gained as a result. What’s the point of training if employees can’t apply it to practice?
Yet, in many companies, we see how learning activities are disconnected from operational needs. Employees keep getting the same generic training modules that were developed years ago and take ages to complete. More importantly, in many cases, the business needs surpass the training content being delivered to the employees; but because current LMS systems require significant resources in updating and personalizing those modules, the learning needs of businesses remain unaddressed while employees become uninspired by the lack of quality or relevance of the training made available to them.
As a result, many L&D professionals have an extremely hard time proving clear business ROI on their learning initiatives.
Even if the training program is thoroughly designed and employees pass tests with flying colors, there might be no improvement in their performance. The thing is that learning activities don’t necessarily reflect what happens in practice. Consequently, the main goal is to make training hands-on, customized, relevant, and measurable or, in other words, performance-based.
Performance-based training centers around not teaching everything relating to the subject matter — it is about analyzing each employee’s job performance, previous learning success, expected outputs and tasks to be done to achieve certain business objectives.
Six key benefits of performance-based training
According to the Human Capital Institute survey, only 27% of employees think their performance management is effective enough to help them develop necessary knowledge and skills. Garry Ridge, CEO of WD-40 Company, concisely describes the very core of how performance management together with training keeps your organization afloat:
“In business, we have limited amounts of time, talent, treasure and technology. A good performance management system ensures that people make good, effective use of their time; that the talent in the organization is developed; that the treasure is well invested; and that your technology is properly used to support the forward momentum of the business.”
In other words, performance management is a tool that is used to develop employees to see real results. We should understand that learning and development is a long-term investment that shows impressive outcomes. Basically, here’s the “What’s in it for me?” of performance-based training:
- Reduce training costs and time.
When training programs are developed to meet specific goals and are performance-driven, they are more cost-effective. Since they focus on certain areas that require improvement, employees don’t waste time learning irrelevant material and companies don’t spend money on training in the “wrong” areas, those that contain material that employees already know or is not needed for dealing with a particular challenge.
