Impacting Profit by Returning Capacity

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Everything you do to impact profit - primarily increasing sales or reducing expenses, including cost of goods sold - influences the bottom line of your income statement. - Seeing the Big Picture by Kevin Cope

Do you consider the impact on capacity and efficiency of your organization when developing learning experiences? Whether you measure it or not, the decisions you make as a learning professional have a direct impact on the bottom line of your organization. Time spent learning, while worthwhile, impacts time spent selling, developing products, and supporting customers.

Here's a quick example
​Imagine that you have a 30 minute elearning course, that's all employees must complete every year, to protect against legal issues. If you have 1,000 employees in your organization that's 30,000 minutes (min) per year spent training for this course.

1,000 employees X 30 min = 30,000 min of productivity
30,000 min / 60 min per  hour = 500 hrs*
500 hrs / 8 hours per work day = 62.5 work days!
*Not including any time lost due to task switching.

In 3 years time, that's 187.5 work days spent on this course alone!

The cost of this time spent may pale in comparison with the cost of a multi-million dollar legal action. However, that doesn't mean your hands are tied. You can take action to improve efficiency of your learning experiences and return capacity to your employees.

Two options to impact the bottom line

1. What do employees really need to know? Ask stakeholders if employees need to complete the same course every year. Can they take a refresher instead? Cutting even 10 minutes off of the course saves 167 hrs per year. (20 min * 1,000 = 20,000 mins | 20,000 mins / 60 mins per hour = 333.3 hrs)
2. Make it adaptive! Can employees take a quiz or complete a simulation to bypass parts of the course or maybe all of it? A 10 minute quiz, with the requirement to complete refreshers on missed topics can also reduce the time spent without impacting outcomes.

Take action now!

1. Review your portfolio: Are there programs in your portfolio that can be improved, replaced, or removed? Take the time to determine if its worth the cost to re-design them or even replace them with a non-training solution. Per Kieran King, VP of Global Customer Insight at Skillsoft, "The failure of learning transfer costs companies millions of dollars a year in wasted expenditures and probably several times that in lost opportunities." 
2. Be courageous: The next time a stakeholder asks you to create a mandatory training, without a clear impact to the business, ask them if this project is important enough to use x amount of your organizations capacity. ( x employees * y time spent learning =  z capacity).

Trust me, when you ask someone if their project is worth 500 hours of Operations capacity, they'll think really hard about their answer.