Case Study: Pharmaceutical Company
Pharmaceutical Company Uses Metrics that Matter® to Validate the Value of Its Leadership Program
Company Overview: The pharmaceutical firm recognized that cultivating leaders was important to the success of its organization. As a result, the company established a leadership program to build organizational bench strength and groom future leaders.
The learning program spans several months and is meant to improve an individuals acumen in key leadership areas such as coaching, building relationships, communications, and situational leadership.
Measurement Approach: The pharmaceutical firm collaborated with KnowledgeAdvisors to build customized data collection instruments that would be collected at key milestones. One instrument was used to measure satisfaction of the program and to forecast effectiveness, impact, business results and ROI. A second instrument gathered data from participants’ months later to re-examine effectiveness, impact, results and ROI.
Measurement Obstacles: Program participants were from multiple locations and extremely busy. The pharmaceutical firm leveraged automation and technology for the data collection effort to be error free and easy to do. Metrics that Matter® was used as the collection vehicle whereby a URL was sent to participants and each participant was able to easily submit their data at the end of the program and months later. The learning and development team was then able to quickly run real time reports against this data to assess quality, effectiveness, impact, results and ROI.
Measurement Successes: The leadership program has been a success at the pharmaceutical firm. Hundreds of executives have completed the program. Some of the most powerful elements of the program were in the ability to teach executives how to better understand themselves and to communicate better with others. The metrics revealed these critical behaviors.
Further, the data revealed that individuals were able to raise the bar on their overall human capital performance by nearly 8% specifically isolated to the training which translates into a financial return of 3.96 to 1 when considering program cost and value of the human capital being trained (i.e. salary). This performance improvement was translated into key business results that improved months after completing the program. Nearly 68% of program graduates indicated significant gains in their productivity and 90% indicated significant gains in employee satisfaction results.
A softer ROI revealed that the majority of program participants felt the program was a very worthwhile investment of company dollars and their work time, especially considering the commitment the company and individual must make to complete the program.
Metrics that Matter® was able to tabulate these results in a timely manner and combine them with qualitative comments (cases from the participants) to paint a very objective and timely view of the program results. Finally, the pharmaceutical firm leveraged the vast benchmark database of Metrics that Matter® to gain business intelligence that measured the leadership program against other programs (internal benchmarks) and against external benchmarks in the systems normative database. This helped the team understand how the program stacked up against internal and external peers.
