Constantly Thinking About the Numbers

You, as a workplace learning and performance professional, must use a continuous value management mindset. You have to work to keep the balance of the perceptions within your organization weighted to the conscious or surprise levels. This transition requires a shift away from a one-time mentality of using an ROI study as a quick fix for the perception of your value or of finding some other way to once again prove your worth, so that you can go back to just focusing on the mechanics of your job. With a continuous value management approach, you must constantly think about the numbers. After all, the numbers are the principal focus of all levels above the Individual performer.

To ensure that the perception of your value remains high throughout the organization, you should

Create a financial imperatives scorecard. You ‚ ll learn all about this tool in the next chapter, but essentially such a scorecard tracks the costs and benefits of a chosen intervention and connects the intervention to the organization ‚ s financial imperatives.
Invest in appropriate evaluation and feedback for your programs. You can make all of the financial value claims that you want, but you must eventually back up your claims with data from different types of evaluations. If you don ‚ t have such evidence of your value, you risk losing your creditability. The definition of credible data changes with each level of your audience. You ‚ ll learn more about how to match evaluation data to audience levels in chapter 10.
Create a quarterly communication plan. Value must be communicated regularly to counteract value slide. Even so, value is not heard if it is not connected to the urgent and important activities that occur during each quarter of the year. A quarterly communication plan is tailored to the context of a business ‚ s activities. This is the focus of chapter 11.

If Marcella had taken a continuous value management approach, she would have reset the baseline for her contributions each time they changed, and she would have had documented evidence of performance improvement over the last three years to review with Kathleen. That way, she could have avoided an unpleasant discussion based on invisible value and different opinions .

In addition, Marcella would have performed different types of evaluation over time so that she could have verifiable financial data and numbers that matched the type of information that each level of her audience needed to hear.

Finally, if Marcella had a communication plan, it would have helped her to manage her value and to negotiate for what she needed to perform even better rather than reacting to what seemed to be an unreasonable demand from her management team.