ROI through communites of practice

My colleague John prompted me to include this as a post to my blog. As part of my research for Assignment 2 and work on the wiki it got me thinking about training and ROI from a business perspective. Having recently been involved in budget cuts at work it is often the training budget which is the first to go… So how do we as trainers or learning professionals convince the corporates that training cuts are a short term strategy (particularly in an era of skills shortage, buoyant labour market and employee mobility).  

One solution is to look at investment in human capital as a sound investment strategy that has measurable business outcomes.  Another solution is to redefine learning and training initiatives and set up communities of practice within organisations.

(COP - a group whose members regularly engage in sharing and learning based on their common interests). 

An article by Lesser and Storck 2001  discusses some links to business outcomes and organisational performance which could be used in justifying the worth of establishing communities of practice as learning vehicles within organisations. Lesser and Storck (2001) argue that the “social capital resident in communities of practice leads to behavioural changes that result in greater knowledge sharing which has a positive influence on business performance’ (p833).

Business often look for ROI and increases in productivity from training and learning initiatives. In addition the loss of product knowledge and social capital which an employee takes when they leave an organisation costs organisations thousands of dollars as does the cost of training a new employee and bringing them up to speed.

So a justification could be that the knowledge that has been captured in perpetuity within this global virtual space during e-learning activities remains the property of the organisation and a resource which new employees can access and get quickly up to speed with an organisations goals, practices and networks.

This study looked at seven local and global organisations which had implemented communities of practice with the following key outcomes:

- maintaining and developing an organisations long term memory
- sharing knowledge outside traditional organisation hierarchical boundaries and within and across departments
- enriched learning opportunities for individual members of the community
- higher motivation to apply what people have learned
- decreasing the learning curve for new employees
- responding more rapidly to customer needs and inquiries through improved knowledge
- reducing rework and preventing “reinvention of the wheel”
- generation of new ideas for products and services  (Lessor and Storck 2001)

CoPs, Ramblings |