Driving L&D Impact with Explorance Metrics That Matter at Sysmex America

Challenge – Overcoming Challenges with Tailored Data 

How can organizations leverage feedback to enhance learning outcomes and drive business results? L&D departments are continually trying to demonstrate their impact on employees and the company to justify investments in the program.  

Kim Rihman is the Director of Training Development at Sysmex America, a medical device company with its own clinical laboratories. The company’s learning program focuses on people managers to prioritize and encourage the most efficient work processes.  

“People managers of the most critical folks in your organization because your most important asset is your human capital,” Rihman said. 

However, without adequate data, Sysmex’s training development department couldn’t appropriately assert the value of its programming. Additionally, even the data it had access to, such as a Net Promoter Score (NPS), was difficult to explain clearly to executives.  

The decision to implement Explorance Metrics that Matter (MTM) was presented as a way to test assumptions and introduce a new standard of data-driven decision-making for training development at Sysmex. 

Solution – Using MTM to Refine Onboarding and Vendor Strategy 

Kim recounts an assumption generally accepted within her team: Mondays and Fridays are bad days to deploy training. This assumption stemmed from the limited data they had previously accessed and was partly proven wrong by MTM data. While a potential lack in popularity, these days were far more suited to the schedules of their remote workers.  

Additionally, the MTM data uncovered knowledge gaps within associates about their core business functions. “Our learning data through MTM helped us realize that our associates needed to learn more about our internal business, so we made decisions about courses and curriculum and created a new set of curricula,” Rihman explained.  

Results – Improved ROI and Business Knowledge Through Tailored Training 

Using MTM data, Sysmex decided to implement a new training program to improve the management team’s knowledge and workflows. Explorance customer success managers were instrumental in setting up the software and devising the feedback process. 

“Our executive leadership team and the learning development team have worked together to build a new management training program,” she added.“We have 192 associates that will be cycled live through our organization in nine cohorts. We’re working with our business partner in MTM right now to ask very specific questions so we can garner behavior change impact with a very concise group of people.” 

By implementing MTM, Kim and her team can eliminate the subjective aspect of the L&D process. By providing stakeholders with detailed data analysis, they can identify Sysmex’s actual training requirements.  

“It’s tough to put a metric on some subjective change. But what I think is important is that you start small and don’t let go of the data,” she said. “Data is what’s going to drive a lot of decisions, and it helps you be nimble and flexible. So, something that we used to wait a long time for, we would only take inferences or pieces of information.” 

Data analysis on subjective topics like L&D is more complex but can ultimately be even more valuable. It’s essential to take things slow and not overwhelm your organization with data, but once all the feedback sources are meshed together, your decision-making power is significantly increased.