How We Know Our Training is Working at DCS

What are we setting out to achieve?

As a business with a heart in distribution and manufacturing, we have a very strong culture of compliance training. It’s never been enough for us to simply meet the basic audit standards for our sector. For many years we have committed to additional accreditations because we believe they’re important – for the safety of our own people and supply partners and for the quality of service we want to deliver.

And that creates a heavy load - of training and recording and internal auditing. We would be lying if we said it hadn’t sometimes created internal tension between Operations Managers who want their staff fully focused on their role and the L&D and Quality teams who are driving skills development and evidence. Happily, in the last year, we have found a great solution with Observational Assessments – training and auditing all in one as well as developing the skills of the Managers!

The results have been tangible and multi-layered: an 84% reduction in learning time; zero loss in production hours; simultaneous development of the Observational Assessor and further specific gaps with a quantifiable measure of their impact identified.

However, our training is not purely about skills development and the business results they drive.

We want to create a sense of pride amongst our teams for the business they are showing commitment to.

We want to retain and attract great people.

We want our people to feel valued.

We want to create efficiencies and even better ways of working and collaborating.

We want people to enjoy working at DCS.

How do we know if it is working?

In other areas of the business where we have been focussing on developing sales and commercial skills, true to the Kirkpatrick evaluation model, we gather immediate responses on learning from the training and we allow ourselves a few moments to bask in the glow of the great scores! We know this is only the first level of measurement, but an important one for understanding how our colleagues perceive this investment of their time – not the trainer’s time.

We also use free form questions and these have been powerful in showing us which of our goals beyond skills development we are hitting. The consistent themes have been a sense of being valued by the business and creating more efficient ways of working.

Our layered approach to our training – where we revisit knowledge and skills in different formats such as team sessions or ‘surgeries’ or masterclasses – helps to show what learning

has landed and been integrated into the day job, as well as what hasn’t and which needs to be reshaped.

Levels 3 and 4 of the Kirkpatrick model, behaviour and results, are being measured through ‘work-withs’ and coaching and a growing bank of anecdotal evidence of successes in practice.

The ‘luxury’ of having an in-house training team allows us to see the 4 levels in practice – and to intervene and support at the right time in the right way.