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Welcome to this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast, where we bring you the latest insights and practical tools for enhancing soft skills training in your organization. This podcast is brought to you by HRDQU.com, and I am your host, Sarah, Learning Events Manager at HRDQ-U. And today have Dr. Jack Phillips joining me to discuss the webinar Secrets of High-Performing Organizations: An ROI Approach. Jack, thanks so much for joining me today. My pleasure, Sarah. Thank you.

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Now, Jack, you have done, we’ve worked on numerous webinars together. You’ve been on the podcast a handful of times as well. But for those new listeners, can you share a little bit about who you are and what you do, how you got to where you’re at today? Yes, I’m chairman of the ROI Institute. And this is an organization we founded about 30 years ago. And it’s to help people see the value of what they do and show the value of what they do.

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no matter what they do. But a lot of our focus, as you suggest, has been in the learning and development space. And in that space, a big area we work in is the soft skills. Now, both, the co-founder is Patty Phillips. She’s the CEO and I serve as chairman of the board. But we both have corporate experience. I came up through L&D initially, engineering initially, and then quickly into L&D and become

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L&D manager, HR executive, ended my career as president of a regional banking organization. But along the way, we developed this methodology. We call it the ROI methodology. It helps you not only evaluate the impact and ROI of a program, like soft skills, but it helps you design for that and deliver it.

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So it’s a really proactive system. And this is why we use that term ROI approach around this particular webinar we did on the secrets of high-performance teams. This is an area we work in, in organizations. help them build capability with their workforce and see the value and show the value.

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And Jack, what advice would you give organizations trying to future proof their learning and development strategies? Yes. Well, first, learning and development is so powerful, so precious, and so needed, and so necessary. But it’s not perceived as valuable to the organization by a lot of top executives. And the reason is that we just don’t show them the impact that we have and maybe the ROI. So we’re

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We’re often the first budget to be cut when there’s uncertainty in economy. And we see that now in our economy. And so most people come to our process when they’re trying to protect their budgets or get more budget. And so when you show someone the value that it delivers, it makes them want to invest more, not cut it away. In fact, if it’s uncertain times, I think I’d want my best

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team available in front of the customer or doing the work that we got to do. So uncertain economies and down economy, for example, is probably the time they should invest more, not less. But they’ll do that if you show them the value. So you got to be bold and take the initiative to show the value in terms that an executive can appreciate and understand.

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And that’s actually impact in ROI. You know, we help people measure the reaction to the program, the learning they have from the program, how it’s applied, and then the impact in ROI. That’s five levels of outcome. Reaction, learning, application, impact, and ROI. Hey, you can do it. And say major projects and programs need this kind of evaluation. That’s what we described in our webinar.

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How do you build a high-performance team? Well, that’s going to come from the first level of supervisors, as we talked about in our webinar. But it’s a matter of taking initiative to do something and to be bold enough to evaluate it, all the way to impact an ROI. That’s what we’ve got to do these days. And Jack, that’ll lead me here into this next question. Let’s dive into the webinar content a bit. So we recently did this webinar just this week.

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on the Secrets of High-Performing Organizations and ROI approach. What were the key takeaways for our registrants at this event? Yes, I think there’s probably five things here. One is we’ve got to make sure we understand that the performance of a team has got to come through that first-level manager. That’s such an important team. And that manager must be

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working with the team using a set of competencies. So we need competencies. We need to work with a first level manager and we’ve got to work with competencies. Now, we find those competencies usually by looking through literature, or interviewing people who are our best performers, interviewing our managers, executives. But there’s a lot out there already. We showed you a set that’s used with this fashion stores.

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that you would actually know if I used the name. it’s a, you probably, if you had nothing, you’d want to work with this level of, I mean, these set of competencies that are there. So you’ve got to have that. And so you want to connect, conduct the program with these supervisors using these companies, but there’s a couple of other things that’s going to support that. Now, one of those is the,

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Performance management system, you know, that’s our system of evaluating performance of people. We may have to tweak that. It’s not absolutely necessary, but it’s going to help us because if we start evaluating people with impact data, those are key performance indicators. If we start having that as part of our performance management system, it helps because they already know those numbers quite well. They’re used to working with those numbers. They’re used to delivering those numbers.

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So if we’d say make a few tweaks in that. And finally, one other area is the culture. See, we all have a culture. Every organization has a culture. I’ve had someone tell me, in our organization, there’s no culture. I said, well, that’s your culture then. Because you have no system of behaviors, rules, or anything that you want to have happen. But in reality,

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They do have cultures and we work hard to make those cultures work for us and for the people and for everyone involved. We just suggest that your culture should include accountability and say that’s the key thing. We say add to your culture a culture of accountability. And it’s thinking through that value chain that we just talked about. People react, they learn, they apply, they have impact and they have ROI.

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And we got to think through that on any project or any program. So if you’ve got people thinking that way, they don’t get surprised when you start asking for impact data or to perform on impact data. So those are the five takeaways. Hope that’s not too much time. No. And so what are the common challenges then that organizations face when they’re trying to implement a high performance team? And how can they overcome these? Yes.

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Well, getting support for this, ideally, again, it’s deciding on competencies. It’s training the supervisors to deliver on that. It’s having an evaluation system that will not only evaluate it, but help you get there, design for it, and deliver it. But I’m also suggesting you go out and look at your performance management system and also your culture.

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So that’s a lot of things to do. So the challenge is, my God, people often say, I have none of that. What can I do? How do I even get started? Well, just start with those competencies and use the ones we have in our case study that we provided for the webinar there. Use those competencies and start training your supervisors and have them deliver that

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performance for you. Hey, that’s not that difficult. And to get support from that won’t be that difficult. If you can tell your senior executives, I want to train all of the supervisors on how to deliver high performance, who could be against that? I mean, who would say, no, we don’t want that? We really do. And they may say, how are you going to do that? And say, here’s the competencies that we’ve identified. And see if you agree with these.

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and we’re going to train them, and we’re going to show you the value at the end that they have delivered with this program. Who could resist that? So making that proposal to the senior executives is so important. And it’s like one of those that they couldn’t resist. And they’d appreciate the fact that you’re doing it, wherever you are in the organization. And it’s not them having to tell you, we need more performance in this organization.

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Get started with it. Just work with those first level supervisors with a soft skills program that you pointed out in the very beginning, That’s the key. And then how does the ROI methodology help identify areas where an organization may be underperforming? And what steps can leaders take to then address those gaps? Yes. Hey, that’s a great question. First, what you want each person to do.

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These are supervisors now and a supervisor is going to have an array of key performance indicators that reflects the performance of the team. So you want them to select at least two measures that they would like to improve as they implement this program. And so with the team, say a supervisor might say

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we’ve got to improve our productivity. Another one might be it’s retention. Or if they got two, you could have both of those. Or it could be the quality of work or maybe the time to do things. So there are selected measures that are important to them. But now to your point, we could go to our senior team and if we don’t know it already, we could ask them, what are our key challenges in this organization? What is it we’re not doing so well? Is it growth? Is it productivity?

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Is it retention? Is it the quality of our work? Is it the customer service? What is it? And they’ll tell you. They often tell you often what it is. And so if you’ve got, say, five things that are real critical to your organization. So now what we’ll do is to take those five things, five areas, and say to the supervisors, when you select two measures here, make sure they’re in these five measures. So now what you’re tackling,

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or some challenges in the organization. It’s linking it to key problems, as you suggest, that we’ve got to tackle. Or there may be opportunities. It says, we’re growing, but really, we should have more growth. It’s not a problem. It says, there’s an opportunity we’re missing. So those challenges would be both opportunities and problems. It’s a good question. Thank you.

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So then in your experience, how do high performing organizations balance innovation with maintaining a strong company culture? And what role does measurement play in that balance? Yes. Goodsee, you bring in another issue that’s important here. We talked about culture, innovation. You see, innovation has just gone crazy, and it’s in the name of AI lately.

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AI is just part of innovation and it’s been evolving for years. We just labeled a big part of innovation AI and that’s the part that’s connected to computers and with a focus on trying to do what people do and that gets us in AI. So what innovation does for us in an organization is we try to use innovation to make things better.

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And we often want to spark that creativity with people. Whether you’re using an AI tool or not, or you’re finding a way to improve something yourself, try to bring that into the process. So it would enhance what we’re trying to do if you look at creative ways to get to the performance that you need. So is there an AI tool that can help you reduce the time to do something, for example?

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So not only are we teaching you that how do you work with your team to do this, but maybe there’s some tools that we can use. Is there something that we can do from getting the best creative spirit from the employees to help do something as well? So we bring in innovation in there along with culture, along with the performance management system to try to all work together to deliver that performance.

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And then what metrics or indicators should organizations track to continuously assess their performance and ensure that they stay on path to becoming high performing? It’s those impact measures. Again, as you react, learn, apply, and have impact, those impacts are the key measures. We’re going to be monitoring those. This is where we’re going to see our improvement. Now, they’re out there everywhere.

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One of the documents that we provided in the webinar was our job aid. It’s called the ROI methodology and 12 easy steps. Now, in that document, and we hope that your listeners go here and download that document, on page six is a list of the classic key

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KPIs in an organization. Their range is output, quality, cost, and time. Output and quality are effectiveness measures, time and cost are efficiency measures. Now, we give you lots of examples from different organizations, from governments and health care and companies and school systems. know, it doesn’t matter where you are, you’ve got those kind of measures.

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And those are the measures that we’re going to connect to our program. And those are the measures that we’ll be monitoring to see how we’re changing those measures. And when we do that, we’re going to separate the effects of this program from other influences. that’s a critical credibility issue. That is, if I’ve improved accidents in my, if I’m in a manufacturing area and I’m,

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accidents, employee accidents are too high and I bring them down. The question is how much of that improvement is connected to the program? That brochure, mean that job aid that we’re giving you as a download shows you a page there of the different techniques that are used to sort out the effects of your program on that.

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So it’s not just a matter of monitoring it, but you’ve got to see the connection between what we’re doing and that measure. That’s the credibility part. So we can say, this program has delivered this performance. It’s very important. And you’ll get so much good response from your executives when you do that. You’re being very credible, and you’re being very conservative here.

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Thanks, Jack. Yes, we will share that information down below in the description so that you can access that resource. And lastly, Jack, where can listeners go to learn more about your work? Go to our website. That’s roiinstitute.net, not dot com, but dot net. And you can see there. You can come to me directly. And that’s jack at roiinstitute.net.

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And I’ve got my key partner here, Jennifer Wingate. She’s on with us. You can go to Jennifer. She’s a lot more pleasant to deal with than I am. J-E-N-N-I-F-E-R at r-o-s-t-o-t.net. Hey, and we’ve got a, you can go to our website, even download some materials, stuff that’s there. But we’d love to have a conversation with you, talk through your issues, like the kinds of good questions you had here. We’d be happy to address those in your situation. So we’re.

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We want to make sure you’re able to show the value of what you can do and we’ll help you get there. And we’re all standing by to do that. Thank you. Well, thanks, Jack. Thanks so much for your time today. My pleasure. And we will have, if you haven’t had the opportunity to check out the webinar, I highly recommend you do so. We will have that information linked below too so that you can.

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can find out how you can do that. And we hope you enjoy listening to the HRDQ-U In Review podcast available on all major streaming platforms. If you did enjoy today’s episode, make sure to give us a follow and leave us a five-star review. That’s how we’re able to produce this free weekly content to you. Thank you all for tuning in to this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast brought to you by HRDQ-U.