When organizations consider whether to hire a performance consultant, one of the first questions is often, “What will it cost?”
That’s a reasonable question. But it may not be the most important one. The better question may be:
What will it cost if we solve the wrong problem?
Organizations spend significant amounts of money every year developing training, implementing new tools, communicating new processes, and asking employees to change their behavior. When those investments address the real cause of a performance problem, they can deliver tremendous value.
When they don’t, the cost can extend well beyond the price of the original solution. That’s where performance consulting can make a difference.
Comparing the Major Performance Consulting Models and the Evolving Role of Instructional Design
Why Is It So Easy to Underestimate the Cost of a Performance Problem?
The cost of performance consulting services is visible. An organization receives a proposal, sees a project rate or hourly rate, and can easily identify the expense.
The cost of an unresolved or misdiagnosed performance problem is much harder to see. The cost may appear as lower productivity, missed sales, customer complaints, rework, employee turnover, slower processes, poor adoption, or managers spending valuable time correcting the same problems repeatedly.
And then there is the cost of trying to solve the problem.
Imagine a business leader approaches L&D and says, “Our employees aren’t following the new process. We need training.” The L&D team responds. Subject matter experts are interviewed. Instructional designers create the program. eLearning Developers build it. Managers schedule employees to attend. Hundreds of employees complete the training. Six months later, performance hasn’t improved.
The training itself may have been excellent. The problem is that employees already knew how to perform the process. Perhaps the system made the process unnecessarily difficult, managers were reinforcing an old procedure, or employees were being measured and rewarded for something that conflicted with the new expectations.
The organization hasn’t just spent money on ineffective training. It has also spent another six months living with the original performance problem.
What Can Happen When You Skip Performance Consulting?
1. You May Solve the Wrong Problem
One of the primary roles of a performance consultant is to investigate the gap between current and desired performance.
What should people be doing? What are they actually doing? What is preventing them from performing as expected? The answers aren’t always related to knowledge or skills.
Employees may understand exactly what they’re supposed to do but face confusing processes, inadequate tools, conflicting priorities, unclear expectations, insufficient manager reinforcement, or incentives that encourage different behaviors.
Without that analysis, organizations can easily invest in a solution that addresses a symptom rather than the cause.
2. You May Build Training That Wasn’t Needed
Custom training can represent a substantial investment. There is the time spent by instructional designers, developers, project managers, subject matter experts, reviewers, facilitators, and administrators. There may also be expenses associated with technology, multimedia, travel, translation, or licensing.
Then there is the employee time required to complete the training.
Consider a relatively simple example. An organization develops a two-hour training program for 500 employees. Even before considering development costs, the organization is committing 1,000 hours of employee time to the intervention. If employees didn’t need additional knowledge or skills in the first place, that is a significant investment in solving the wrong problem.
A learning and performance consultant may discover that the better solution is a workflow change, improved manager communication, a job aid, clearer performance expectations, or another intervention that is both less expensive and more effective.
3. The Original Business Problem Keeps Costing Money
The cost of an unsuccessful intervention doesn’t end with the money spent developing it. The original problem is still there.
If the issue is affecting sales performance, the organization may continue losing revenue. If employees are making errors, rework continues. If the problem involves customer service, customer satisfaction may continue declining. If employees are struggling with inefficient processes, productivity remains affected. This is why business performance consulting should ultimately connect performance problems to business outcomes.
The question isn’t simply, “Did employees complete the training?” It is, “Did the business result improve?”
4. You May Keep Treating the Same Symptoms
When an intervention doesn’t work, organizations sometimes try again. Employees receive refresher training. Managers get another communication. A new job aid is created. The course is revised. Another campaign is launched.
Each response requires additional time and money.
Meanwhile, the organization may never have stopped to determine why performance isn’t changing.
Performance consultants can help break that cycle by stepping back from the requested solution and examining the factors affecting performance before another intervention is launched.
5. L&D Can Lose Credibility With Employees and Business Leaders
Employees quickly recognize training that doesn’t help them do their jobs better.
If employees repeatedly attend courses addressing problems they don’t actually have, they may become skeptical of future learning initiatives. Even valuable programs can face resistance because employees have learned to view training as another requirement rather than a useful resource.
Business leaders notice, too. When learning initiatives don’t produce meaningful change, L&D can begin to be viewed as a function that delivers courses rather than a strategic partner that helps solve business problems.
Performance consulting helps shift the conversation from “What training should we build?” to “What needs to change, and what’s preventing that change from happening?” That is a very different conversation.
6. Your Internal L&D Team Loses Valuable Time
There is also an opportunity cost that can be easy to overlook. Suppose an instructional design team spends six weeks creating a program that ultimately doesn’t address the performance problem. What else could that team have accomplished during those six weeks?
Most L&D organizations already have more projects than people. Spending limited resources on the wrong intervention means other priorities may be delayed. Bringing in a performance consultant can provide additional expertise and capacity while allowing the internal team to remain focused on the work where they can provide the most value.
From Instructional Designer to Performance Consultant:
When Does It Cost More Not to Hire a Performance Consultant?
Not every performance challenge requires an outside consultant. Organizations with strong internal performance consulting capabilities may already have the expertise to conduct the necessary analysis. But there are situations where bringing in outside performance consulting services can be particularly valuable.
Consider hiring a performance consultant when the business problem is significant, the root cause isn’t clear, multiple stakeholders disagree about what is causing the issue, or previous attempts to solve the problem haven’t worked.
Outside expertise can also be useful when a proposed solution will require a significant investment. Spending money on diagnosis before committing substantially more money to implementation can be a smart business decision.
There is another situation worth considering: when internal employees may have difficulty challenging the assumptions behind a request. If a senior leader has already decided, “We need training,” an outside performance consultant may be better positioned to ask, “How do we know?” That question alone can prevent an organization from moving too quickly toward the wrong solution.
How Should You Compare the Cost of Performance Consulting to the Cost of the Problem?
When evaluating whether to hire a performance consultant, don’t look at the consulting fee in isolation.
Ask:
- What is this performance problem costing the organization today?
- What could it cost if the problem continues for another six or twelve months?
- What will it cost to design and implement the solution currently being considered?
- How confident are we that we understand the root cause?
- What happens if our proposed solution doesn’t work?
Those questions put the cost of performance consulting services into a much more useful context. A relatively small investment in diagnosis may help an organization avoid a much larger investment in the wrong solution.
The Most Expensive Performance Solution May Be the Wrong One
Performance consulting doesn’t always lead to a large consulting engagement, a new training program, or an expensive technology solution. Sometimes it leads to something much simpler.
The answer might be clearer expectations, manager reinforcement, a redesigned workflow, a job aid, changes to incentives, improved tools, training, or a combination of interventions. The value of performance consulting is finding out what the organization actually needs before spending significant time and money building the solution.
So when you’re considering the cost of hiring a performance consultant, look beyond the consulting fee. The bigger expense may be the months spent living with an unresolved performance problem—and the money spent trying to solve something that wasn’t causing the problem in the first place.
Performance Consulting and Results Contracts:
Ready to Work with Us?
Does your L&D team have more projects than people?
Many organizations in this position turn to contract performance consultants to analyze the need for performance initiatives without overloading internal teams. If you’re exploring options or comparing performance consulting companies, you should learn more about how organizations design and scale these solutions.
TrainingPros is a learning and development company that connects organizations with experienced instructional designers, eLearning developers, and performance consultants. We’ve been named a Top 20 Staffing Company by Training Industry and a Champion of Learning by the Association for Talent Development (ATD), recognition that reflects our commitment to delivering high-quality, tailored learning solutions.
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If your learning initiatives require additional support, whether for a single project or a large-scale rollout, our relationship managers can help you find the right expertise quickly and confidently.
When you have more projects than people™, let TrainingPros find the right consultant to start your project with confidence.
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Frequently Asked Questions
About Performance Consulting
What does a performance consultant do?
A performance consultant helps organizations identify the causes of performance gaps and determine which interventions are most likely to improve business results. This typically involves analyzing desired versus current performance, identifying barriers to success, and recommending solutions based on the root causes rather than beginning with a predetermined solution.
How much do performance consulting services cost?
The cost of performance consulting services varies based on the complexity of the business problem, the amount of analysis required, the number of stakeholders involved, the size of the organization, and the scope and duration of the engagement. Organizations should consider the consulting cost in relation to both the cost of the performance problem and the investment required to implement potential solutions.
When should an organization hire a performance consultant?
Organizations should consider hiring a performance consultant when an important performance problem doesn’t have an obvious cause, previous solutions haven’t produced results, stakeholders disagree about the cause, or the organization is preparing to make a significant investment in a solution.
Can a performance consultant determine whether training is necessary?
Yes. One of the benefits of performance consulting is determining whether a knowledge or skill gap is actually contributing to the performance problem. If employees know what to do but other barriers prevent them from doing it, additional training alone is unlikely to solve the problem.
What is the difference between a performance consultant and an instructional designer?
An instructional designer primarily focuses on designing learning experiences that help people develop knowledge and skills. A performance consultant begins earlier in the process by determining what is causing the performance gap and whether learning is the appropriate solution. When training is needed, performance consultants and instructional designers may work together to ensure the learning solution supports the desired business outcome.
