Across just a six-month span, a large ed-tech company enjoyed a boost in customer retention and customer satisfaction, while worker productivity increased as well. Did the organization achieve this by magically lowering prices while innovating its product and raising employee compensation all at the same time? Nope.

Instead, its learning and development leader had a clear vision of driving business KPIs with L&D by improving customer churn and engineering throughput outcomes. The executive recognized that first-level managers were in the best position to facilitate such results. So they cultivated a training program focused on that role, enlisting GrowthSpace, the coaching and mentorship platform, as its partner.

Omer Glass, co-founder and CEO of GrowthSpace, told From Day One's May Virtual audience during a recent thought leadership spotlight, that results like these start with a simple formula that sports a fun acronym: POP, which stands for “population outcome program.”

“This is something you can do basically tomorrow morning and start experimenting with,” said Glass. “It’s very cool. Once you do it, it becomes addictive.”

First, Glass explained, figure out what “population” of the workforce you should focus on, based on their potential to drive your desired KPIs. Ask yourself: “Which population is the most important to invest in?” Is it managers or R&D leaders for example?

Once you’ve limited your search to a broad group, narrow it down further to the employees within that group who have the most promise in terms of KPI outcome delivery.

When it comes to “outcomes,” the goal, Glass said, is to drive performance, reduce attrition and build a promotable base.

“If you thought of a population, you can think, ‘OK, I want to drive performance for my engineering [team],’” said Glass. “The next thing, which is the most critical thing that you probably ask is, ‘How do I measure it?’ and ‘How do I know I can really attribute the change to what [I] just did?’”

He explained that outcomes can be measured in three different ways, through program surveys, leveraging HR analytics and/or the attainment of defined business or organizational KPIs. Glass recommended a deeper focus on the lattermost option, as it’s the most reliable and informative.

“The best way to really make sure that you’re attributing the success to your Learning and Development program is to A-B test,” he said, suggesting that the R&D population and the customer success population each be split into halves with the L&D program being the only variance between the groups.

Finally, it’s time to design the “program,” with a focus on driving toward the desired KPIs.

“You can do mentoring, you can do training, you can do coaching, could do team coaching, workshops, internal mentoring,” Glass said, suggesting one-on-one coaching as the most effective means of development. “But the outcome you’re trying to drive needs to be connected with what you’re doing,” he added. “You need to focus on a program that’s very focused on a very specific metric.”

With that in mind, it becomes easier to execute the crucial next step of pairing employees with their coaches for five concentrated sessions across two months, which allows the process to be scaled (or altered or terminated if it does not appear to be achieving its purpose). Outcomes are then measured and Glass said, overall, GrowthSpace partners that engage in this program report a 50% reduction in employee attrition, a 10% increase in promotable base, up to a 10% increase in internal productivity metrics and up to a 7% increase in functional KPIs, such as sales or operations improvements.

“We basically help companies achieve their business outcomes, by becoming more business critical, by helping them deploy human-to-human programs,” Glass said of GrowthSpace.

A very tech-forward solution with a human touch? Sounds like a viable balance of old and new school approaches team members can get behind.

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, GrowthSpace for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.

Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer, and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.