No business ever funded a learning metric.
Our recent Training Industry webinar brought together Allyson Roote of The Bonadio Group, Brian Jarvis of WM, Karen Ganitsky of 3M and Valerie Marsh of Jushi for a candid conversation about how they connect learning initiatives to outcomes their businesses already value.
And they brought their receipts.
Our panelists shared real examples of how they identify the outcome, find the evidence and work with stakeholders to demonstrate learning’s contribution to the business.
Missed the webinar? View the recording below.
We started with four questions every learning team should be able to answer before starting a project:
- What outcome are we trying to achieve?
- What data do we need to know whether we achieved it?
- Who owns that data, and how will it be shared?
- What have we agreed that proof of success looks like?
Those are the challenges our panelists are working through every day — and many of our attendees told us they’re facing the same ones.
Here are five takeaways to help your L&D teams start answering those tough questions.
1. Start with what needs to be different
When a business leader asks for training, it’s easy to start with the learning solution. Our panelists approach it differently.
Karen encourages you to ask, “What change are you looking to drive?” followed by an even more practical question: What do you want people to do differently the next day? Understanding the problem and the desired change gives L&D somewhere to start.
Our first audience poll illustrated why this matters:
We asked attendees to imagine that they trained managers on giving feedback and, six months later, turnover on their teams increased. 83% said there was no way to tell from that number alone whether the training worked.
If your team doesn’t agree on the intended outcome and definition of success up front, interpreting a number afterward becomes a real guessing game.
More from the webinar: We’ve pulled together answers to questions asked during the live webinar and compiled poll results for the data lovers. Check them out
2. Your best evidence probably isn't in the LMS
One point came through clearly across all four panelists: the evidence that matters most to the business often lives outside L&D.
Depending on the problem, that evidence might sit with HR, sales, operations, finance or another part of the organization. And the metrics that matter will look different depending on the business outcome you’re trying to influence.
Across the panel, that meant looking at things like promotion, retention, ramp time, attrition and operational performance. None of that data lives in the LMS.
And the audience could relate. When asked whether attendees could get the business data they needed to demonstrate impact, 59% said they could — but only by asking someone for it every time.
Just 14% had easy access.
Finding the right metric is only part of the challenge. You also need to know where those metrics live.
3. Getting the data is a relationship problem, too
So what happens when someone else owns the evidence you need? You build the relationship.
Karen shared the importance of building a strong partnership with her sales technology team. When she didn’t have direct visibility into the data herself, she turned to her partners to help uncover the Salesforce data she needed.
“You have to be able to speak the language of the business.” — Valerie Marsh
Valerie emphasized the importance of listening to the business. Understanding what senior leaders care about and knowing the priorities your stakeholders are working toward is vital to building these relationships.
The value of relationships showed up in our polling, too.
When asked what blocked attendees from getting business data, 33% said nobody had blocked them — they simply didn’t know who to ask.
That’s an important distinction. Access to business evidence isn’t just a measurement challenge, it’s also a stakeholder challenge.
4. Highlight what learning contributed — not just the outcome
Business outcomes have multiple inputs. Even when the numbers move in the right direction, learning is just a piece of the puzzle.
The goal isn’t to prove that learning alone caused the result, but to demonstrate how it contributed to the change. That means connecting the learning initiative to the behaviors or performance it was designed to influence. Sometimes we also need to help connect the dots and highlight the other contributing factors.
That’s not underselling L&D. It’s making a more credible case for its contribution.
Knowing what you can reasonably claim — and what you can’t — is an important part of demonstrating impact.
More from the webinar: We’ve pulled together answers to questions asked during the live webinar and compiled poll results for the data lovers. Check them out
5. Want stakeholder engagement? Stop leading with learning.
Toward the conclusion of our webinar, we asked attendees what was standing between them and more outcome-driven work. The biggest response wasn’t data access or competing priorities.
49% said they couldn’t get a business stakeholder to engage.
Allyson’s advice here was simple: stop leading with the learning initiative and focus on the business problem.
Leaders may not engage around attendance, completion rates or program evaluations. They will engage around retention, growth, performance and the other outcomes they’re already responsible for.
Karen saw that shift firsthand at her company. Her team took a training program that had existed for roughly 15 years and decided to reframe it around a problem sales managers were currently trying to solve.
They didn’t need a shiny new learning solution — they needed to connect their existing solutions to what the business needed in the moment.
Keep the conversation going
There’s plenty more from the conversation than we could capture here.
Watch the full webinar to hear Allyson, Brian, Karen and Valerie share their experiences connecting learning to business outcomes.
And because we couldn’t get to every audience question during the session, we kept the conversation going. We’ve pulled together answers to the questions we missed, along with the complete poll results and additional examples from our panelists.
Get the webinar Q&A + poll results
As you think about your own learning initiatives, come back to the questions we started the webinar with — and make sure the answers connect the work you’re doing to the outcomes your business actually values.
Because measurement that doesn’t lead to a decision is just reporting.
Discover practical advice from learning leaders who are building influence, demonstrating value and strengthening L&D’s business impact. Get the ebook
