This post was originally published on lessonly.com.
Fast-growing companies have a lot of hair-on-fire problems, but one that usually contends for the top spot is new employee onboarding. I think we’ve all been there at some point—you show up for a new job with a fist full of sharpened pencils, a punny desk calendar, dapper new chinos, a paper bag lunch in hand, all ready to rock your first day. And then, you discover that absolutely no one is ready for you.
Luckily, we’re past the days of pulling up a chair next to someone and looking over their shoulder for a few weeks. More and more workplaces have adopted online training software as a standardized onboarding tool, making high-quality training accessible to just about anyone with an internet connection.
Unfortunately, only 12% of U.S. employees strongly agree that their company does a good job of onboarding new employees, according to a Gallup study. Don’t let your employees share the same sentiment as the majority of folks. Make sure that your training is valuable, useful, and effective.
You can’t blindly trust that rolling out a shiny new training management software is going to solve all of your onboarding woes. To ensure that your plan is working well and delivering ROI, you’ll need to measure and evaluate the impact of training software for employees. With an optimized onboarding strategy in place, you can trust that employees are enabled to do their jobs well.
So how can you evaluate the impact of online employee learning? Let’s explore a few strategies to get a feel for whether or not your company training software is really cutting it.
Collect feedback from employees and customers
Probably the most valuable way to evaluate your training and development software tools is to ask the people that use them everyday— your employees! You might choose to have direct conversations with them, opt for anonymous surveys, or some combination of the two. Not sure where to start? Try to gather feedback around these ideas:
- Satisfaction ratings
- Likeliness to recommend
- Ease of use
- Quality of content
- Value of training
- Freeform thoughts
Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a great starting point.
But wait, that isn’t the only group of individuals that you need to interview to get feedback on the impact of your employee training platforms. Your customers are a valuable source of information on the effectiveness of your training programs, too. Solicit feedback in the form of a Net Promoter Score (NPS) that measures customer experiences with their points of contact, like your sales and support teams. When your NPS rises, you know you’re doing something right.
Employee performance, effectiveness, and success
Collect some broad statistics on employee performance and turnover—you might glean some insight into how well your organization’s onboarding strategy is really working. A poor onboarding experience is certainly going to reflect poor performance and employee attrition, particularly for entry-level roles or roles with systemically high turnover. Consider collecting data relating to the use of interactive training software during regular performance reviews, 360s, and exit interviews.
Common success metrics
Not all industries are created equal—some metrics may vary based on the nature of your business. We mostly focus on sales teams and support functions. Why? Because these are often the ones that scale quickly during rapid growth periods. Sales reps and support agents also tend to require more onboarding and internal knowledge sharing in order to reach peak performance—so we’ll dive a little deeper for those teams in particular.
Metrics for sales teams
For sales teams, beyond the obvious revenue-related metrics, success is ultimately about shortening the length of the sales cycle. The duration between first call and close can be influenced by a variety of factors. Some are outside of the account executive’s control, but others are controllable. If you want to track preparedness and product knowledge, pay attention to metrics like these:
- Percentage of time selling vs. doing administrative tasks
- Sales velocity
- Overall length of sales cycle
Metrics for customer support teams
The efficacy of onboarding or training manifests in a few customer specific metrics like these:
- First response time (can be impacted by backlog created by poor training)
- Overall resolution rate
- First contact resolution rate
- Average ticket handling time
Native training software analytics
Any online training software worth its salt should have a comprehensive analytics module that helps administrators understand adoption rates and usage statistics better. Poor stats reveal opportunities to improve content. Keep an eye on these types of metrics and adjust accordingly:
- Test scores
- Time spent on training modules
- Time of day activities are completed
- Interaction rates
- Posts with most comments or feedback
- Individuals with most engagement / interactions
- Video pause points
- Course completion rates
- Most popular discussion topics
Lean on Lessonly by Sesimic
The best employee training software is really the one that produces the best results for your organization. Lessonly by Seismic is training and coaching software that makes it easy for you to tie training efforts to real business results. Get a demo today.
