Is L&D Necessary For A Company?
Learning and Development (L&D) is an essential choice for every company. But sometimes, it’s hard to convince the leaders to make that decision. Managers are mainly responsible for canvassing leaders to invest in Learning and Development. It’s a tough duty for L&D to ensure leaders invest in it. The main reason why leaders don’t want to invest in Learning and Development is because they don’t realize its benefits. But it’s the manager’s job to explain the benefits to leaders in a perceptible way. The leaders can only be happy about L&D once they see its tangible benefits. Below, we'll explore the reasons why L&D is needed in a company.
The Pros Of Learning And Development
Fewer Employees Quitting
L&D professionals can prove to a company why investment in their department is required in a lot of ways. Firstly, if the company aims to reduce attrition, L&D is a brilliant way to do it. Statistics have shown that if a company invests in its development, employees become more loyal to it and are less likely to quit. Seeing an experienced employee quit is not good for any company, and rehiring another one in their place is costly.
Ensuring Compliance
Learning and Development is also needed in companies where compliance is a major problem, like the healthcare industry. When such companies invest in L&D, they save a lot of money on litigation costs that could have arisen if they were non-compliant. Hence, for these companies, L&D is quite mandatory. In such organizations, it's easier for L&D to prove that such an investment can be worthwhile. They can use case studies from different companies to prove how L&D prevented their non-compliance.
There are different ways an organization can ensure that compliance is taught. The L&D department can check the responsibilities of different people in this regard. They can create different user groups and craft modules for compliance training. This has to be designed efficiently with proper-sized modules that don’t confuse the employees. On top of that, they have to be simple so that employees understand them. Only an experienced eLearning vendor can create visually engaging modules for employees. Moreover, employees are motivated to take compliance training when their objectives are displayed before starting the course.
For example, compliance is necessary for a healthcare organization because penalties in the case of non-compliance can be high. When patients get treatments in such hospitals, they are assured they are in good hands because all the employees are properly licensed.
How To Prepare An L&D Program
The L&D team needs to ensure that the information delivered to the employees is absolutely necessary for them. They don’t need to be taught extraneous information because it can be a waste of time. Apart from that, it also leads to cognitive overload. Employees are busy with their jobs, and it's time-consuming to make them grasp unnecessary information.
The Learning and Development department must make sure that its objectives are realistic. For example, if an objective does not provide any value, it’s just a waste of money for the company. Hence, before creating any objectives, L&D professionals must consider their effect on the business and its processes. Only a thoughtful learning objective can yield useful results for the business.
Any L&D program must inform the leaders of how business goals can be attained through Learning and Development. So, any L&D team must link their success to the company goals to convince top management to approve this expenditure. The different domains of a company are its operational enablers.
How To Justify The L&D Expenditure
These enablers require expenditures as well. For a business to function smoothly, all the departments must operate correctly, which is possible when there is no unpredictable situation. Just like all these departments, L&D also has expenses, and a business has to choose which department's request to fund.
Since the L&D department is also a cost center, its managers must make certain that it will enable compliance in the company and prepare other departments for any future changes in the business. This is called change management.
Conclusion
For the L&D leaders to prove their worth, they must cooperate with other departments and consider their goals. When the L&D department helps increase the performance of other departments, it can prove to be of considerable worth to the company.
