Measuring the ROI of your training is all about the maths.

So how would you feel if you totted up how much environmental or health & safety incidents REALLY cost you each year – and it came to $400,000!

This is what happened to a client of mine, who asked me to help them add up the costs of a significant spill. Although the spill incurred no enforcement action, fines or legal fees, they found to their consternation that it added up to over $150,000.

The company was at that time internally reporting around 50 environmental incidents and near misses a year. When we looked at it, the numbers actually showed that while the level of incident reporting was steadily improving, there wasn’t enough good data in the reporting database to indicate how much time and effort it took to clean up and follow up all these events.

So I estimated the real annual cost to the company of all its incidents and near misses.

Using data from their incident reporting database, I spelled out all my assumptions about the number and size of environmental incidents and their likely clean-up cost and added it all up.

Now here’s the thing: ROI is one the few areas where you often have to talk down the potential benefits of your work, because the numbers literally look “unbelievably” good. So I took the very conservative approach that professional trainers recommend for ROI estimates – and came up with an annual cost of $400,000.

Where does that $400,000 come from?

It comes from the constant low losses of time and materials that eat away at your productivity and your profits.

And if the real cost is half that, or half that again, why would even a big firm leave $100,000-200,000 on the table that it could easily save? How much preventative training could you do for $100,000 or $200,000?

We can play around with the numbers, but it’s clear that most of the time, most of us in our work as environmental managers and trainers are only measuring the tip of a very expensive iceberg!

Carrying out a thorough ROI analysis of your environment and sustainability training can bring out some compelling numbers if we go about it in the right way; numbers that can justify many times over the cost of developing and delivering our training.

Want to know how the world’s best professional trainers do it?

Join my free webinar on Tuesday 20 October and find out, so you can do it too: https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/webinar-how-to-measure-monetise-your-shovel-ready-training-outcomes-tickets-123572878807