Reporting the impact of communication skills programmes to business stakeholders can be challenging, as the results often take time to emerge and can be hard to quantify.
Explore five practical ways to make your evaluation approach more strategic, helping you demonstrate how learning supports wider organisational goals and creates meaningful business value.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Did you know that only 8% of CEOs see the business impact of their L&D programmes, and fewer than 4% have a clear sense of ROI?
That’s a challenge for any type of training, but especially for communication skills. Unlike technical knowledge or compliance training, the benefits of stronger communication often show up in more subtle ways – in the quality of conversations, team dynamics or relationships with clients.
Asmita Gaba, Senior Manager, Finance Training, British Council, highlights: ‘While financial returns are measurable, the ripple effects of strong communication are better leadership, empathy, clarity and connection. In every high-performing team, it’s communication that makes the difference – often quietly, but always powerfully.’
Asmita’s comment reflects a challenge many L&D teams face: the most meaningful outcomes often don’t show up in the data straight away.
Reporting the impact of communication skills programmes in ways that resonate with business managers can be difficult. While it’s essential to track engagement and outcomes, managers often want to see how learning is translating into day-to-day working – whether that’s through better collaboration, fewer misunderstandings or stronger client relationships. These take time to emerge and are harder to quantify, which is why traditional evaluation methods don’t always tell the whole story.
You probably already have some evaluation processes in place – but when did you last take a step back and check whether they’re still the right fit? As priorities shift and expectations grow, your approach to evaluation needs to keep pace. A fresh look can reveal where small changes might make it easier to measure what matters and communicate value more clearly.
Keep reading for practical ideas on how to take a more strategic approach to evaluating communication skills training – and show how it’s supporting your organisation’s wider goals.
1. Beyond ROI: Return on expectations (ROE)
Return on expectations (ROE) moves the conversation beyond just financial returns to the outcomes that matter most to your stakeholders – whether that’s achieving strategic goals, building leadership capability, shifting culture or encouraging innovation. These outcomes often take longer to show up but offer a clearer view of how learning supports wider business priorities that traditional ROI might overlook.
Natasha Anderson, Learning Experience Lead, Leadership Development, British Council highlights: ‘Communication skills programmes can create value that extends far beyond immediate financial returns by encouraging genuine employee engagement and connecting people to shared purpose. The resulting psychological safety and belonging can drive long-term organisational resilience and innovation.’
Tip: Involve stakeholders early by asking what success looks like to them. Use their input to shape learninggoals and evaluation methods, so you can capture both immediate outcomes and the longer-term shifts that matter.
2. Use systems thinking to understand broader impact
While ROE focuses on whether learning meets stakeholder goals, systems thinking takes a step back to look at the bigger picture. Zu Hui Yap, ex-Director, Strategy & Consulting, Talent & Organisation, Accenture, explains: ‘Learning is just one part of the employee experience. To help people perform at their best, we need to shape the whole system around them.’
By applying systems thinking, you can explore how learning interacts with other elements of the organisation – such as culture, operations and technology – and how these influence one another.
Take a communications course for leaders aimed at improving performance management and feedback. A systems lens encourages you to consider what else might be affecting those outcomes. Are processes or tools making it harder to give timely feedback? Do cultural norms discourage open conversations? Mapping these connections helps you spot what’s supporting progress – and what might be getting in the way.
This approach allows you to evaluate not just what participants are learning, but how well the organisation is enabling them to apply that learning in everyday work.
3. Factor in future scenarios
Scenario planning helps you design learning that’s not only suited to today’s needs but also prepared for what’s coming next. By considering possible future developments - such as new technologies or evolving ways of working - you can create programmes that support both current priorities and emerging challenges.
For example, if your teams are becoming more global, scenario planning can help identify the skills they’ll need to communicate effectively across cultures. This might include a focus on English language proficiency alongsidecultural intelligence.
Kate Sullivan, Global Head of Services and Talent, British Council Corporate English Solutions highlights: ‘Scenario planning isn’t about predicting the future - it’s about preparing for it. It encourages us to build learning that is adaptable and responsive to change, ensuring our programmes stay relevant and valuable no matter what challenges arise. By embedding flexibility into our approach, we can better support our teams today while equipping them for tomorrow.’
Tip: Use best-case, worst-case and most-likely scenarios to test your plans against different possibilities. This simple technique helps you spot potential gaps early and build flexibility into your learning strategy.
4. Use predictive analysis to stay ahead of skills gaps
While scenario planning explores what might happen, predictive analysis focuses on what your data is already showing. It can highlight trends, spot emerging skills gaps and give you a head start in addressing them.
For example, in a telecoms organisation, as technology evolves and customer expectations shift, L&D teams might see growing demand for skills in digital customer support, agile project delivery or clear communication across distributed teams.
Mahmoud Reda, Learning & Development Manager, Vodafone Qatar, explains: ‘Using data to anticipate skills gaps is a proactive approach toward talent and workforce planning. When we analyse performance metrics, employee assessments, industry trends and future needs, we can easily identify where current capabilities may fall short of future demands. We can then target training more effectively and ensure our workforce remains competitive and future ready.’
5. Think portfolios
Looking at learning as a portfolio - rather than as individual, standalone courses - helps you see the combined impact of your programmes. For example, a global team might have training in intercultural communication, emotional intelligence and English language skills. Evaluating these together can show how they collectively support smoother remote teamwork, better engagement and clearer communication across time zones. By setting clear criteria and tracking progress across the portfolio, you can more easily identify which areas are making the most difference, where there are gaps and how to refine your learning strategy over time.
You can also take a portfolio approach to evaluation – one that recognises that no single metric can capture the full picture. Stephanie Croxford, L&D Manager, APAC, Kennedys Legal Solutions, explains: ‘We bring together multiple sources of evidence: immediate feedback on learner experience, behavioural data to track application, manager observations to assess performance shifts and broader business indicators such as retention, engagement, and client outcomes.’ This multidimensional view not only gives richer insight into what's working, but also highlights where we need to adapt.
With a portfolio approach, you not only build a more balanced and credible picture of impact, but also gain the insight you need to make timely adjustments - so you can improve learning as it happens, rather than waiting until programme end.
A strategic approach to evaluation isn’t about complicated systems or excessive metrics. Instead, it’s about asking the right questions, involving the right people and focusing on what truly matters.
As Kate explains, ‘clear evaluation lets you turn insight into action, making learning more effective and relevant every step of the way.’ This approach helps L&D teams demonstrate the value of learning and design programmes that genuinely support business goals.
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