I’ve been noodling with some numbers related to the value of employees participating in Strengths training. What is the real payback?
When a manager asks,

“What’s the business reason for doing this?”

how do I answer?
Thoughts:
The training I provide helps people focus more intentionally on using their unique strengths to improve personal performance. So let’s imagine that an individual who understands the concept can boost their productivity by one hour each day.
It wouldn’t be a solid 60-minute block of high performance time, but 60 minutes spread over the entire day when when he or she was really engaged and “firing on all 8 cylinders.”
Research done by Gallup suggests that teams who are encouraged to play to their strengths are 38% more likely to be high-performing teams, so gaining 60 minutes of better performance each day isn’t out of the question.

If the individual has a salary of $50,000 that extra hour would add up to over $9,000 a year – and that’s just straight pay. Think about the lost opportunity now recovered. Those 60-minutes that are now highly productive were not being used to their fullest, so the actual benefit could be two, three or fours times the payroll cost.

Multiply this by every worker and the potential upside is even more amazing.
Now, factor in the synergy of an entire team playing to the strengths of each member and you have the recipe for a turning a good team into a great team.
The Gallup study that led to creation of the StrengthsFinder test revealed that teams where every member has the opportunity to do what they do best every day were:

38% more likely to be high performing,
44% more likely to have better customer satisfaction scores, and
50% more likely to have low employee turnover.

This stuff really works.