Introduction
If you’re worried about an upcoming recession and its impact on your organization's budget, you're not alone. With many experts predicting a recession in 2023, it’s understandable that companies of all sizes are starting to feel anxious. But here's the thing - all this talk of a recession can actually harm the economy. How? By making executives react in ways that are detrimental to their companies. This could include delaying projects, cutting budgets, and reducing staff. And too often, Learning & Development (L&D) budgets are the first to take the hit.
But this shouldn’t be the case! The truth is, in times of economic uncertainty, it's more important than ever to invest in your company’s L&D strategy. The Association for Talent Development found that companies offering effective L&D programs have 218% higher income per employee than companies without formalized training. And it doesn’t stop there. These companies also enjoy a 24% higher profit margin than those who opt out of training. For long-term success, continuing to invest in training and development - even in times of economic uncertainty - is the way to go.
As new business challenges arise, employees take on new responsibilities, and high–performance leadership teams become more significant. As a result, employees need to receive proper training on how to adapt to new situations, better utilize existing resources, and face challenges head-on - protecting the business and its bottom line.
Increasing the Value and Reducing the Cost of L&D
For L&D to drive revenue, we must stop approaching staff training like it’s a ‘tick box’ exercise. The era of handing out lengthy training manuals is over. These text-based resources take a long time to read, aren’t exciting for employees, and seldom lead to long-term knowledge retention. They’re about 20 years behind the times! As a result, they don’t drive measurable value for any business.
Instead, the focus has to be on creating impactful L&D content that is digestible, engaging, and memorable. And the answer to this is video. After all, we are visual creatures. According to a study by Kaltura, employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than to read a document. And video-based training has an impressive retention rate of 95%! Video makes your investment in L&D go further - and enables staff to retain the knowledge they need to increase the bottom line.
In this guide, we’ll cover how to make your training content more engaging and aligned with business goals, how to measure L&D impact, and the steps you can take to protect your budget.
Why Businesses Must Protect L&D Budgets to Continue Growth
Let’s start with the big one. Most L&D professionals know that the benefits of investing in L&D during a recession far outweigh the costs. But how does L&D impact revenue, and how can you get your executives on board?
Here are a few starting points to help you make a case for increasing L&D budgets during a recession:
01. Creating impactful L&D content can be budget-friendly
02. New challenges require new ways of thinking
03. Investing in L&D now can lead to cost savings down the line
04. L&D is vital to boosting employee morale
05. There’s a cost to cutting L&D budgets
Protecting L&D budgets during a recession is a smart move that can lead to cost savings, improved employee engagement, reduced churn, and increased competitiveness.
To convince executives to protect your L&D budget, you’ll need to align your L&D programs to your business goals with a clear action plan. You’ll also need to provide specific examples and - where possible - use data from employee surveys to support your case. We’ll cover how to do all of this in the next couple of sections.
Don’t Let ‘Soft Skills’ Training Get Left Behind
Most executives understand the value of sharing courses for using new software. But it can be harder to convince them to keep training for ‘soft skills’ - such as teamwork, critical thinking, and negotiation.
This is mainly because ‘soft skills’ are hard to measure and quantify. For decades, businesses considered these skills less critical - or more of a ‘given’ - than others.
But developing these skills is just as important, if not more so, than learning about a new design program. Why? Because soft skills training, which can help with everything from better communication and leadership skills to sharper problem-solving and decision-making, can ultimately lead to a more engaged and motivated workforce. As a result, it has a huge impact on revenue.
Deloitte found that high-performing companies spend 1.5 to 2 times more on leadership development than other companies. This is because when companies invest in their people, they create loyalty and improve morale and employee engagement while strengthening company culture. This helps drive more revenue while reducing employee churn, which is vital when recruitment is so expensive. For example, BrightHR found the average cost of employee turnover is over $35,000!
Remember to communicate the above long-term and revenue benefits when speaking with your leadership team to protect your soft skills training budget.
Ensure Your L&D Programs Align with Your Business Goals
When L&D programs align with business objectives, they become a powerful tool for driving business results and achieving long-term growth. Why? Because they keep employees laser-focused on the most critical for your organization's success.
Aligning L&D programs with business goals enhances the program's perceived value for employees and leadership teams. When employees see that your L&D programs link directly to your organization's goals and objectives, they are more likely to see the program's value and engage in the learning process. This leads to better retention and higher levels of employee engagement, making them more likely to achieve their KPIs.
How Do You Align Your L&D Programs with Your Business Goals?
Conduct surveys, interviews, or focus groups with key stakeholders to identify these needs. By understanding your leadership team’s needs and priorities, your L&D programs will address your business’s most pressing issues - and prove it to those at the top.
By involving important decision-makers - such as your CEO, COO, or CFO - in the design of your training programs, you can align your courses more closely with your organization's goals and objectives.
Choose content and delivery methods most relevant to your business needs and use business case studies and real-world examples in your programs. In many cases, this will mean transforming lengthy guides and PDFs into engaging, accessible videos using a video solution like Powtoon.
Measure the impact of L&D programs on specific business outcomes to demonstrate their value and make data-driven decisions about improving them. For example, you might want to measure the impact of your soft skills training on employee retention. Or the effect your sales training is having on reducing customer churn. We’ll walk you through how to measure the impact of your L&D programs a little later!
Improve Learning & Knowledge Retention Cost-Effectively with Video
So, you – and your executives – now understand the value of a strong L&D strategy for your employees. Now it’s time to optimize your training content to meet your business objectives and set your team up for success.
Your L&D programs should entertain and stick in your employees’ minds to drive business impact. But too often, L&D teams waste learning opportunities by only giving employees static content to consume.
Many employees read their training manuals in good faith - but often don’t absorb or retain the information they read. According to the Social Science Research Network, our brains decode visual information 60,000 times faster than written text.
In fact, according to a study by the eLearning Industry, video-based instruction can improve learning outcomes by as much as 50% compared to traditional text-based methods. It’s no surprise, really! Would you prefer to learn about new software by reading a pamphlet or watching an animated 2-minute video?
Here’s a breakdown of some of the biggest benefits of visual learning:
BOOST EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT WITH POWTOON
Built for L&D teams, Powtoon makes learning videos easy to create, flexible to manage, and quick to distribute. Now your L&D team can deliver effective programs at scale. Globally, over 40 million people use Powtoon to transform complex and scattered information into powerful videos.
With Powtoon, you can create videos that are not only educational but also on-brand, interactive, and entertaining. This leads to a more enjoyable and relatable experience for your employees.
Retention
Traditional Video
Powerpoint or Manuals
Times
Transform Your Training Manuals into Engaging Video Content
Well done! You now have a strong L&D plan, with all your L&D courses and content aligned to your business goals. But to ensure your content delivers a measurable impact, you need to package it in the right way.
Transforming your text-based materials into engaging L&D video content is simple and cost-effective. All you need to do is repurpose the training content you’ve got.
Prove the Impact of Your L&D Programs
Now that you’ve aligned your L&D programs to business goals and made learning ultra-engaging, it’s time to test and measure your L&D programs’ performance. Then you can take the fantastic results to management.
We’ve come full circle to step one: convincing executives how important your work is. You want to show them how your engaging, video-based L&D programs have improved employee knowledge, skills, and behavior. And how this has improved business outcomes with increased productivity, sales, and customer satisfaction.
Continuous Improvement: Measuring the impact of your L&D programs isn’t just to impress executives. It also helps identify areas where your messages aren’t resonating with employees so you can improve them.
Types of Impact to Measure
You can measure several types of impact when assessing the effectiveness of L&D programs. Here are three of the most important:
Business impact
Behavioral impact
Learning impact
How to Measure Impact
Speak to employees directly to gauge changes in learning and behavior.
Ask managers in your company to track and pass on key performance metrics.
Communicating and Reporting on Impact
When communicating and reporting on the impact of your L&D programs, it's essential to use data and metrics to support your findings. Create clear and visually appealing reports (ideally with video), and tailor your message to your audience to make it more impactful and persuasive.
Case Study: Nestlé
Nestlé is the world’s largest food and beverage company. They are present in 186 countries worldwide, have more than 2,000 brands, ranging from local favorites to global icons, such as Nespresso, and are a certified B Corp™.
With a reputation for world-class service, training customer-facing teams properly has always been a top priority for Nestlé’s L&D team. Before they found Powtoon, the team educated Nespresso staff members via PDF attachments on Facebook Workplace and MS teams.
But creating all this written learning content was labor-intensive. And it took even more time to review and revise all new materials to ensure brand compliance. On top of this, the materials didn’t effectively communicate their message to global employees. They lacked the time - and the motivation - to wade through lengthy PDF guides and manuals.
To overcome these challenges, the Nestlé team introduced a platform to the Nespresso Customer Facing Global Teams that provided a dynamic visual experience, saved them time, and allowed seamless brand compliance.
And that’s where Powtoon came in. The L&D teams at Nestlé and Nespresso now use Powtoon to create professional, on-brand video content that consistently supports their training initiatives and meets their learners’ needs. They have replaced factsheets and some of their meetings with diverse recruitment videos, onboarding videos, product walkthroughs, explainer videos, company announcements, celebration videos, and more across Facebook Workplace, MS Teams, and Sharepoint. They also use Powtoon Capture, a built-in screen recording tool, to create personalized tutorial videos.
Powtoon’s simple branding tools have made it fast, easy, and enjoyable for the Nestlé team to produce highly engaging, branded content. They love using color palettes, logo uploads, and personalized fonts to transform templates and characters while staying on brand.
Importantly, they’ve boosted staff engagement by 16% through using Powtoon videos in their training.
“The templates are really useful when I just need to get all the information down, and all the animation is already there. Now I’m able to show a one-minute video rather than explain a new process in a document. This is how we’re able to get people's attention today – with short snappy videos. We've even had employees ask how they can start creating videos themselves.” Charlie Moore, Training Specialist at Nespresso
Today, Nespresso’s engaging training videos enhance their in-store experience and create a common visual language across their company-wide learning materials. They now have more high-performing employees who align with the company’s values, meet customers’ expectations, and perfectly represent the brand.
Conclusion
With the stakes so high in 2023, now is the time to optimize your L&D programs using video. Engaging your employees opens up limitless channels for retaining knowledge and retraining employees. This helps drive results - and revenue.
With the right L&D content strategy, your employees will feel aligned and confident during challenging times. As a result, you’ll experience a boost in engagement, knowledge retention, and productivity - all crucial to succeeding during an economic downturn.
After reading this guide, we hope you feel well-equipped to present your case for investing in L&D, creating engaging video content, and measuring how your L&D strategy helps ‘recession-proof’ your business.
Getting started is as simple as adding Powtoon to your L&D toolbox to create engaging visual learning content that enables your team to stay competitive, track results, and smash their business goals.
