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www.b2billinois.com The Weekly Business-to-Business Forum

Editor: Andrew Wheeler

815-929-5416 awheeler@b2billinois.com

How to Measure FROM THE EDITOR

Training Effectiveness
Joe Giunta | B2B contributor
When the economy scrapes the profit from your
bottom line, it is time to take a closer look at the
return on investments (ROI) from ALL your
spending—including training.
Before purchasing a training program, you
might ask your training provider for ideas on ways
to measure its ROI. Do not assume that training is
too elusive to measure effectively. Many programs
are able to produce a measurable return.
Measuring Results
Most industry experts believe
there are five levels of training
assessment. They are:
■ Evaluate participant reaction
■ Measure learning
■ Assess job behavior
■ Identify business results
■ Calculate ROI
Although ROI assessments are
more difficult and time consuming
to perform, they are also more
useful to the training buyer
because they can clearly justify
training expenditures. It is impor-
tant to understand that not all
training programs can produce a
measurable ROI, but for those that
and evaluate the results against all five levels of
assessment. The ROI assessment will be meas-
ured after a specified time, such as three months,
six months or a year.
If the trained group improves their productivity
by 50 percent over the non-trained group, we can
assume a monetary savings to your company of
$25,000.
Calculating ROI
After you convert the effects of training into dol-
lars, you can calculate your return on investment.
each clarification and count the number of clarifi-
cations made within a specified period before and
after the training. Since time has a dollar value, it
is reasonable to conclude that a 50 percent reduc-
tion in the number of clarifications would equal a
50 percent savings in the associated costs, which,
in this case, is $25,000.
Training Costs and the ROI Formula
There is one more cost to consider and that is
the cost of the training. That has to be factored
into the actual ROI.
When calculating the cost of
training, it is important to include
direct costs such as the cost of the
program, trainer, books, etc. and
indirect costs such as staff time,
classrooms, and supplies. This will
give you the Total Incurred Costs
of the program.
Once we have determined these
costs, we can use the following
equation to measure ROI.
ROI%=Net Program Benefits x
100 divided by Total Incurred
Costs
In our example, the Net Pro-
gram Benefit is $25,000. If the
“You cannot step twice into the same river,
for other waters and yet others go ever
flowing on. They go forward and back
again. “
—Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca.535-475 BCE)
In other words, the only constant is
change. Starting with this edition, every Sun-
day edition of The Daily Journal will now con-
tain B2B Illinois—The Weekly Business-to-
Business Forum. Over the past 5 years, B2B
Illinois has published information submitted
by businesspeople in a monthly direct mail
publication. We are still committed to bring-
ing the best in operational and management
information to our business community, only
now we will be delivering it to doorsteps
across the region as part of The Daily Jour-
nal, every Sunday. We are also developing an
interactive website that will be like no other
in our region. So if you are new to B2B Illi-
nois, welcome! And if you are one of our
long-time readers, thanks for your past and
continued support.
Andrew H. Wheeler
B2B editor
The Absolute

do, it is well worth calculating.
Isolate Effects
The first thing you need to do
is conduct a pre-training assess-
ment and follow it up with a
post-training one. You should do
this with two groups. One group will receive
the training and the other will not. This will
give you a comparison.
Let’s assume you want to purchase a training
program in diversity and your pre-test shows the
following problems:
■ Initial testing shows that workers make many
assumptions about each other’s behavior
■ Analysis of these assumptions indicate a high
level of misunderstanding resulting in time lost
to numerous clarifications and a rising level of
mistrust among workers
■ The calculated time lost due to constant clarifi-
cation and mistrust results in an estimated
$50,000 of unnecessary annual cost to the com-
pany
We can deliver diversity training to one group
Investment Balance is the Key
David Robinson, AAMS | B2B contributor
Balance is essential to almost all parts of our
lives. We balance work and family issues. We can
balance our indulgence for desserts with an extra
trip to the gym. We even balance our checkbooks.
But sometimes, we let our investment portfolios get
out of balance—and that can be a costly mistake.
Of course, for your portfolio to become unbal-
anced, it had to be balanced to begin with. When
you developed your investment strategy, you
probably made sure your asset allocation—the
percentage of your portfolio that you invested in
each asset class, such as stocks or bonds—reflect-
ed your goals, risk tolerance and time horizon. In
short, your portfolio was balanced. However, over
time, the amount of your portfolio devoted to a
certain asset class could “drift” from your initial
asset allocation.
This drifting process can lead to an unbalanced
portfolio—and leave you vulnerable to market
forces in ways you hadn’t anticipated. To illustrate
this point, let’s assume you began investing in
1982 with a portfolio weighted 50 percent in
stocks and 50 percent in bonds. But following the
long run-up in stock prices, nearly 80 percent of
your portfolio’s value might have been in stocks
Start by identifying potential benefits and sepa-
rating them into “hard data,” which refers to meas-
urable benefits and “soft data,” which refers to
intangible outcomes that are difficult to quantify.
Hard data would include:
■ Productivity
■ Quality
■ Labor hours
■ Absenteeism and tardiness
Soft data would include:
■ Attitude
■ Misunderstanding
■ Relationships
In our diversity training example, we linked the
need to clarify communication within the group
to lost productivity. One way to measure that pro-
ductivity loss is to establish an average time for
by the beginning of 2000, assuming you never
rebalanced your holdings. This 80-to-20 stock-
bond ratio probably was much too risky for you.
As it turned out, your portfolio would have
reached the 80 percent stock level at a very inop-
portune time—right before the stock market
decline of 2000-2002.
Consequently, to help avoid taking on too much
risk, you should consider rebalancing your portfo-
lio at regular intervals to bring it back to the asset
allocation that’s right for your needs. In the above
example, this would have meant reducing your
exposure to stocks and adding more bonds.
But rebalancing your portfolio can do more
than just restore your asset allocation—it can also
help you take some of the emotions out of invest-
ing. How? Consider, once again, the huge rise in
stock prices from 1982 to 2000. Caught up in the
euphoria of a seemingly endless bull market,
many investors got greedy and kept buying more
and more stocks—including the so-called “dot-
com” stocks, many of which had ambitious busi-
ness plans but little, if any, actual earnings. When
the technology “bubble” burst in 2000, these
stocks sank—and so did the fortunes of their
investors. Then during the stock market slump
over the next couple of years, investors, driven by
BEST
Total Incurred Costs were
$10,000, the ROI would look like
this:
ROI=$25,000 x 100 divided by
$10,000=250 percent. in Local Dining
Knowing you have a 250 per-
cent ROI for this program will
help justify the cost of the training for the remain-
ing employees. If the ROI is not good, you may
want to re-evaluate this particular program.
Regardless of what level of assessment you use
to evaluate your training, measuring those ben-
efits is a good thing for both you and the train-
ing provider. Ultimately, it will help you make
better decisions about the training needs in
your organization.
Joe Giunta is a contract training
manager for Joliet Junior College’s
Corporate and Community Services
division.
Available and searchable online at
www.b2billinois.com/directories
or available in print at any
Daily Journal office.
fear of more big losses, sold stocks at lower and
lower prices. The biggest sales occurred in 2003—
right as the market was set to rebound over the
next few years. The Definitive
To sum up: Greed and fear caused many
investors to “buy high and sell low”—the opposite Business Contact
of the “golden rule” of investing. But if these
investors had systematically rebalanced their
portfolios along the way, they could have helped
RESOURCE
avoid the negative results that can arise when
emotions dictate investment decisions. (Even so,
asset allocation does not ensure a profit or protect
against loss.)
Your financial advisor can help you establish a
rebalancing strategy. But don’t wait too long to
begin. A balanced portfolio is an essential step
toward helping you achieve your long-term finan-
cial goals.
David Robinson is a financial advi-
sor with Edward Jones in Kankakee.

Available and searchable online at

Dispelling the Disability Myth:
Accommodation Can Restore Productivity
Dorcilla Schoolman | B2B contributor
Often, the general public thinks of ‘disability’ as
being a developmental disability or one that is vis-
ible. But the truth is that ‘disability’ has many
more faces. Diabetes, hearing impairment, arthri-
tis, visual impairment, and heart ailments are just
a few examples of the many types of disabilities.
From walkers to transportation, from grab bars
to disability benefits, from bump dots to lift
chairs, there are many services, assistive tech-
nologies and programs available to assist the per-
son with disabilities to remain independent
and/or productive. However, frequently persons
with disabilities don’t avail themselves of those
resources because of the social stigma, because
they believe that these services are costly, or
because they don’t think of themselves as having
a disability.
Accordingly, the person with a disability in the
workforce does not always know his rights with
regard to his employer, nor does the employer know
his rights with regard to the employee. As a result,
the employee doesn’t ask for reasonable accommo-
dations that will enable the employee to do the job
efficiently and with the least amount of stress.
For example, a loyal, hard-working, productive
employee contracts diabetes and then develops
diabetic retinopathy, a common complication of
diabetes. As the disease progresses, the employee
finds that seeing her computer screen, even with
adjusting the font size, is increasingly difficult. By
the end of the day, the employee has stress
headaches from concentrating so hard on seeing
her computer screen. The employee is concerned
about disclosing that she is having difficulty
because she isn’t sure if she will be viewed as
‘incompetent’ or unable to do her job. Productivi-
ty has been diminished.
Two rather inexpensive steps could be taken to
resolve this problem and it is within the employ-
ee’s rights through the Americans with Disabilities
Act (ADA) to ask that they be taken. If the
employee had asked for an accommodation, her
www.b2billinois.com/directories
or available in print at any
Daily Journal office.
employer could have purchased a screen magnifi-
er for less than $50 that would help the employee
to see the screen without struggling. Additionally,
the employee could be given an accommodation
to take an extra 15-minute break to rest her eyes
each day. Productivity could be restored.
B2B Illinois is YOUR
Please remember—an accommodation may be forum for local business
all that is needed for a person with a disability to news and information.
perform the essential functions of a job. Don’t Send us your articles, news,
think disability equals absence of ability. Chal- press releases, event photos,
questions and comments:
lenging our old stereotypical impressions and def-
initions of the word ‘disability’ will help us to find
and keep qualified, talented workers. E-mail Andrew Wheeler at
For more information, please visit Great Lakes awheeler@b2billinois.com
ADA’s website at www.greatlakesada.org.
Your information may appear in print and/or
Dorcilla Schoolman is operations online at www.b2billinois.com.
manager for Options Center for
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Independent Living. length, not for content. We also reserve the right to
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