A Real return on Training Investment

A Proven Return on Investment from Management Development Courses

There has been and ongoing debate as to whether it is possible to measure the quantitative effect of management development courses. The existing evidence is somewhat contradictory and therefore Call of the Wild, as with all our courses, sought to find out if such a measure can be made in order to provide reassurance for the client that they would get a real rather than perceived return on investment.

Background and Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study was to investigate changes in work performance after completion of a typical three-day outdoor management development (OMD) session organised by “Call of the Wild”. This session involved participants working as members of a team in a variety of outdoor challenges, in order to develop skills that would prove valuable if they could be transferred back to the workplace environment.

The effectiveness of this session was measured using a specially adapted version of the Life-Effectiveness Questionnaire (LEQ) developed by Neill, Marsh & Richards, (2003), which measures a person’s life effectiveness, that is, how competent a person perceives himself or herself to be in a variety of areas necessary for success in working life, including communication and team-work.

Comparisons were made between participants’ life effectiveness in terms of various aspects of work performance prior to the three-day OMD session and one month after this OMD session. In addition to this, six telephone interviews were conducted with participants of this session, to supplement the information provided by the questionnaire data. The participants in this study were eighty-five employees of BMW/MINI, who were participating in the three-day OMD session organised by Call of the Wild Ltd.

There were seventy-four males and eleven females, with an average age of thirty-seven years. This session proved to be effective, as participants’ life effectiveness skills as measured by the LEQ were significantly greater one month after completion of this session than prior to this OMD session.

Who Are Call of the Wild?

Call of the Wild conduct a variety of OMD sessions in Wales and throughout the UK. For the current investigation, Call of the Wild conducted the OMD training session at their training centre in the Brecon Beacons National Park, north of Swansea, Wales. Throughout the year Call of the Wild hosts a number of OMD team building, leadership development and management sessions, including management training and management development courses.

Since 1998 Call of the Wild has been host to a diverse range of clients, including large multi-national companies such as Orange and Vodafone. The team building, leadership and management courses are specially structured to meet the needs of the client organisation, and Call of the Wild’s philosophy is based upon experiential learning theories, in order to bridge the gap between high potential and high performance between teams and individuals. The problem-solving activities that participants complete while involved in these sessions are relatively short in duration, typically lasting no longer than twenty to thirty minutes. Teams were directly assessed on how successful they had been at completing each task, and a running competition was staged between the teams involved in this session.

Results

A one-way within-subjects repeated measure analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted in order to see whether or not there were any differences in the skills measured by the LEQ across the test times (before the OMD session, and one month after completion of this OMD session). The results of this test show that there was a significant difference ( F = 9.7, p<.05) in the reported life effectiveness as a result of participation in this programme.

One month after completion of the OMD session, six non-rigorous telephone interviews were conducted with the participants of this session, in order to support and extend the information provided by the LEQ. The results of these interviews suggest that the OMD session had a positive effect upon those taking part, in terms of enhanced levels of trust and co-operation between team members. It was also suggested that many of the effects of this session were enduring, and that these skills successfully transferred back to the workplace environment, resulting in an enhanced level of individual and team performance within the organisational setting.

“Call of the Wild designed, developed and delivered a superb team building event for the Sytner BMW/MINI Division in May 2006. We were delighted with their speed and professionalism in working up a programme for the 85 managers concerned. The event, held at their Brecon Beacons base, addressed all of our aims and objectives. These centred on building a ‘One Team’ business ethos and developing our management team working. We wanted to achieve this in an environment that took individuals out of their normal comfort zone into a stretching but non-threatening and fun environment. Feedback from the Manager delegates and our Senior Management sponsors was fantastic, with requests for repeat events on a regular basis. We were very impressed with Call of the Wild’s project management, their design team and excellent facilitation of the whole event.”
Sue Sansome
Group Training & Development Manager
Sytner Group Ltd