The *New* Smart Goals for Learning Teams
December 6 • Written by Julie Dozier
Show your value as a team by focusing on these new and improved goals. Choose one of our four goals to start with and determine clear metrics you want to track to tell your story.
The learning professionals we work with belong to different industries with different team structures and different approaches to learning — but there is something they all have in common. Everyone is under the same pressure to continuously show their value and increase their value to their organization.
A big part of your success starts with setting the right goals as a learning team. For this exercise, we are asking you to think beyond your work of creating new learning solutions and delivering those to the organization. What is your bigger goal — your long-term vision that you are trying to accomplish for your organization?
To inspire you, we present four NEW goals to consider and associated metrics that are geared toward learning professionals and designed to help you show your value to your organization. Use these as a starting point as you identify what’s important to your team and what you want to measure to show your progress and tell your story.
Vibrancy
Vibrancy is a new metric for us. In the business world, vibrancy is typically used to measure community health for a company that relies on a strong user community. It may be difficult to measure the interaction of your learning community online, but we like the idea of finding ways to measure the energy and commitment of your whole community or a specific learner group. Adopting this metric requires you to assess your learners as a whole, look for trends, and do new things to cultivate the learning culture and better learning behaviors at your organization.
As you examine a target learner group, look for indicators that their learning energy is growing and changing as a group. A vibrant learning community is pushing new types of learning for their group, they are developing more facilitators and coaches, and they are practicing and trying new methods to improve their results.
VIBRANCY METRICS
There are many possible indicators of community vibrancy. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Total time spent learning as a group
Numbers of new learning activities available for the group
Voluntary learning (learning that is not required)
Once you choose how you want to define and measure vibrancy, you can set targets for your goals. What changes do you want to see for this particular community? By when do you want to see improvement? Set ambitious targets!
Innovation
You and your team want to continuously improve how you deliver for your organization. Innovation can mean adopting the latest and greatest learning methods and techniques available. It can also include improving existing offerings in any way, to any degree. Can you measure innovation? Absolutely, and it’s important to do so! Having a specific goal in this area can guide you to look for new vendor partner and test out new tools/platforms to improve your offerings. It can also guide you as you redesign existing programs.
We see two main categories for innovation where you might focus and measure your improvement: increasing your output and improving your quality.
Increase your output: Innovate by seeking a new tool that allows you to develop solutions faster. A better tool could decrease your team’s time spent developing and delivering solutions and increase your capacity to take on more projects. Alternately, examine and improve your processes. Doing a process improvement project as a team could allow you to do more as a team and get better results.
Improve your quality: Innovate with a new partner! Find a new vendor who can deliver new learning techniques that will yield greater engagement and better results. They may offer something you aren’t able to deliver today, such as personalized pathing or built-in coaching based on learner selections. You can also move the needle by adopting better learning strategies internally. You could focus as a team on new ways to include more social learning or more practice opportunities — strategies you know will lead to better results. With everyone on the team innovating together, you can improve your programs across the board.
INNOVATION METRICS
As you innovate, take a before/after approach to measurement. For example,
Learning completions before/after the improvement
Time spent learning before/after the improvement
Other ideas include developing a learner survey to gather information about their experience before/after making the change. You can also ask your business partners to report on progress and improvements they are seeing with performance and their business indicators.
Loyalty
We know how important your relationships are with your stakeholders and partners — these relationships directly impact your success and your leadership’s trust in your team. A loyalty goal helps you show how you are intentionally building relationships to support business goals and optimizing the available learning for different parts of your organization.
Here are some categories to explore in the area of loyalty: offerings you can introduce for additional parts of the business and ways to improve existing partnerships.
This year, we supported one of our clients to dream up a better structure for her team and propose this reorg to her leadership. This learning leader felt her team could deliver more and higher-quality solutions for the business if they could make some changes to how they were organized.
Together, we designed a new structure, with five small teams aligned to their organization’s five learning portfolios. This was a shift from their open shared services model where work was assigned in a more ad hoc way. This leader needed to show the current gaps in their ability to deliver and the ways this new organization would strengthen the quality of learning for each portfolio and the ability to deliver more over time. This change would require adding additional headcount, so we boldly proposed the new structure and made the case for adding these new team members.
To her surprise, the reorganization was approved by her leadership without any hesitation. The new team members will be added one by one over the next year, but our client has already been able to reassign her current team members to work in this new way and is seeing the benefits of the changes — along with a new spirit of ownership and pride in the results.
Offerings for additional parts of the business: If there is a part of the business that is underserved, discuss how you can collaborate to deliver learning for their needs. Keep expectations realistic for both you and the group you are looking to support; these targeted offerings could start small and grow over time. Start by reaching out to areas that you aren’t currently serving to see what the appetite is and what their needs are. Figure out ways you might work together to deliver something that will benefit them.
Improving existing partnerships: Find out what pain points your current partners are experiencing. Are the existing solutions delivering what they need and getting them the results they need? Be open to your partners’ feedback and ideas they have for improvement. These conversations can result in solutions your team would have never identified on your own, and they can also work to build that loyalty your team needs in the business.
LOYALTY METRICS
In the area of loyalty, here are some things to measure:
Parts of the business served (before/after)
Targeted offerings for specific roles/functions/grades (before/after)
Business partner satisfaction improvements (think NPS)
Profitability
Are you measuring profitability today? Maybe now is the time to start! It’s critical to figure out ways to quantify the impact learning is having on results and improving the bottom line. We suggest having each curriculum owner partner with their stakeholders to identify at least one business metric you can watch to see the impact of learning.
PROFITABILITY METRICS
There are so many different ways to approach measuring profitability — it just takes one approach to get started with showing your impact. Consider focusing on ways to improve performance improvement, people metrics, or business enablement.
Performance improvement: What results are your business leaders seeing in the performance of their people? You can track a business metric before/after the rollout of a new program, or before/after updates you make to an existing program. You can track learning completions related to a specific business goal of the moment. This shows that A) you are aware of these business goals, B) you offer learning solutions that support them, and C) your team is intentionally trying to move the needle within your sphere of influence (a real three-birds move!).
People metrics such as retention and mobility: The availability of excellent learning opportunities and continuous development can make such a difference for these important people metrics. Every learning team should be trying to impact retention and mobility in different ways. One way to do this is create a campaign to raise awareness about what is available. You can also improve the quality or types of learning opportunities available to employees in an effort to boost your employer value proposition and improve the employee experience.
Business enablement: What new challenges and growth opportunities is the business able to tackle because of your excellent learning programs? As a team, think about your involvement as directly supporting these business goals. Attach your success to the success the business is experiencing because of these new initiatives. For example, if a new system the business is launching is promising better results, the excellent awareness or systems training your team creates to support the rollout is now part of that success story. Treat that team’s goals and targets as if they are your own.
Your Turn
You now have four different ideas of new learning metrics to adopt that can help you and your team set clear goals and make progress in showing your value. Choose one to start that you’d like to set a goal for and measure your improvement. Meet with your team members to define the new goal together, choose your metrics, and set targets for the changes you’d like to see. Be bold! Start your measurement process by gathering data on your current state.
Hold yourselves accountable by sharing your targets with your stakeholders and your business partners. Sharing your goals with others outside your team gives them a chance to support you. They may have ideas for how you can achieve your goals and ways you can work together. Improvements in learning benefit the rest of the organization too, so inviting others to support will help them contribute to everyone’s success.
We’re here to support your journey! Contact us at connect@tangramlearning.com for further inquiries and support.