How Insights Discovery Helps Achieve 2063% ROI

You come across a people development program that boasts of 2063% ROI. What doubts would creep in your mind?

My cool blue energy (cautious, precise, questioning) would be brimming with pointed questions:

• How credible is their calculation process?

• How did they calculate the monetary benefits?

• How was the data collected?

• What interventions were used?

• How many people were involved?

• What were the practical implications?

• & so many more.

In this post, I’m gonna answer those questions and help you decide if this program really offers $20 dollars back for every dollar spent on people development.

For those unfamiliar, Insights Discovery is a personality assessment tool that helps individuals understand their preferred working styles and improve team dynamics through increased self-awareness and better communication.

Why did Insights conduct this study?

Insights as an organisation has been in the market for almost three decades, but in terms of market penetration it lags behind other popular personality assessment tools. Especially, in Thailand, where MBTI, DISC or Strengths Finder are corporate favourites. This study helps them showcase the superior quality of the tool, the ease of application and its sustainability.

Who were involved in the study?

Indeed, one of the top job sites worldwide, with a global employee presence of more than 13,000 has been partners with Insights since 2014 for their people development initiatives; primarily team effectiveness. Since then, they have generated at least 15,278 personal profiles and accredited 29 practitioners.

In late 2021, Insights brought in ROI Institute, Inc., a global name in evaluating success of projects and programs, to credibly showcase the program’s impact and ROI.  Decision was made that participants who go through the Insights Discovery program from October 2021 to September 2022 will be offered a chance to participate in this extensive study. This would allow participants enough time “to have skills in place and the impact clearly in focus”.

A total of 1304 participants were in the study; however, only 505 completed and submitted the survey reports. These were extensive multi-pager qualitative and quantitative surveys. More on this below.

How credible is their ROI calculation process?

The ROI Methodology is one of the most used evaluation systems among Fortune 500 companies and many government, non-government and public institutions in the USA and across 70 countries.

A five-level evaluation framework was used for this study.

Level 1 - Reaction & Action Planning

Participants were asked to rate their satisfaction of the program on eight reaction parameters. You can see in the figure, their top takeaway:

“The Insights Discovery program is important for my professional/life  development.”

As an HR/L&D professional, you’d probably know that employees constantly demand for programs that help them grow professionally and personally; a program with high overall well-being implication.

Level 2 - Learning Results

This part helps us understand what exact knowledge and skills they gained from this program, which was relevant to their day-to-day work. They had 9 areas of learning to choose from. As you would expect, over 65% highlighted they found learning about “their own personal opportunity areas for improvement” as significant or very significant.

The above results make team leaders and talent management departments’ job so much easier.  You now have intrinsically motivated employees, and you know what kind of support would extract the most ROI from them. It’s a win-win-win situation for you, the employees and the organisation at large.

If you look closely, the third biggest learning outcome highlighted was recognising my colleagues’ colour energies/preferences. In your day-to-day work routine, this means that the team members know each others’

• needs

• motivation

• trigger points

• preferred working style

• preferred communication style

and, hopefully, use the above data points to build trust, empathy and strategic influence.

Level 3 - Application Results

This is an extremely important section for us because having the knowledge doesn’t equal impact, actioning on that does.

“Knowing isn’t power until it’s applied.”

Here the researchers are trying to track any behavioural changes among participants and how they were applying the learnings from the program. They had 13 action and behaviours to rank on a scale of 1 to 5; from “no success” to “very significant success”.

Indeed should be extremely satisfied to notice the 3 most successful application participants mentioned focused on collaboration and team effectiveness:

1. Participants are “adapting their behavior to work with others more effectively”

2. Participants are “considering how their actions impact others when making decisions”

3. Participants are “identifying other people’s preferences by observing their behavior”

My only concern here is that they could have gathered a more holistic feedback through a 360. Even manager’s feedback on any behavioural changes they noticed among participants would have added more credibility to the findings.

Level 4 - Business Impact

I’m sure you were waiting for this section. There were several tangible impacts the study brings forward, some are really hard to measure. Let’s understand how these were calculated.

First, they subjectively rated the 6 explicit areas of business impact plus an ‘Other’ option. Any rating below 4 was not included in the ROI calculation.

Next, participants who rated any of the options “4 and above” had branching (follow-up) questions, where

• Q1A – They attached a monetary value to the business impact chosen in the previous question

• Q1B – They credited a percentage of the monetary value to Insights Discovery program

• Q1C – Finally, they rated their own confidence in crediting the above value and percentage

In all fairness, the researchers used a four-tier filtering process to determine which ones to be included in the final calculation.

However, the same concerns surface. Their approach seems highly subjective and uni-dimensional. Adding a 360 element, a control group comparison or simply comparing monetary differences between the study period and previous years would have added robustness to the calculation.

In fact, this was also mentioned as one of the “blockers”in the study. Having ‘productivity’ parameters and ‘clear objectives’ right at the beginning would have given more focus and perhaps greater or higher return on investment.

The researchers justify the approach by ensuring that the data was collected in the most unthreatening, unbiased way from the participants themselves, who are perhaps the most credible source.

Calculating ROI on soft skills development is notoriously challenging, which makes the transparency of this study particularly valuable even with its limitations.

Level 5 - ROI Calculation

On pages 16 and 17, you can clearly see their calculation process. The base numbers were provided by the Indeed Analytics Team. Rest of the numbers are extracted from the participants themselves, and all of them together are put through the ROI Methodology.

Let’s take “Detail C – Time to Full Proficiency” as an example to understand how they came up with the final number for this one.

You’re a participant completing this survey.

1. You choose ‘Onboarding speed to proficiency’ as ‘Agree’ or ‘Strongly Agree’.

2. You then answer the branching question as “25” days as the actual number of days saved to become fully proficient in your job thanks to Insights Discovery program

3. You then scored your confidence in the above number as 75%

399 people responded to this question and among them 25.8% like you, either agreed or strongly agreed with this parameter, which comes up to 103 (rounding off).  Adding the number of days the 103 of you have mentioned comes up to 874 days. And the average confidence level among this population is 49%. Finally, the base monetary value of dollars saved by the organisation per day was provided by the Indeed Analytics Team, which was $59.10. Now, we can calculate the ROI.

Money saved = 874 x 49% x $ 59.10

While I’m naturally skeptical of extraordinarily high ROI claims (my cool blue energy at work!), the methodology transparency here allows us to make our own informed judgments. What I appreciate in the study is the transparency. The report accepts that due to high cost of retention the final value reflected may attract a lot of skepticism.

Also, the turnover reduction value calculation takes into consideration the total number of people who were extended this survey (1304), but if we reduce that number to the actual number of participants (n=94) who responded to this specific parameter positively, the final monetary value would come down to an ROI of 518%, which is still phenomenal.

Beyond the Numbers

What this report doesn’t explicitly highlight, and rightly so to avoid any subjective narration, is the impact this program has on two of the most essential ingredients of building an emotionally intelligent high-performing team:

trust & psychological safety.

The foundation on which those two are built is Team Awareness; how well they “know” each other. By “knowing”, we mean do the team members know each others’

• needs, fears, interests, values, strengths, gaps

• preferred style of decision making

• preferred communication style

Vanessa Druskat in her extensive study on Team Emotional Intelligence calls this building “a sense of belonging”.

At Victus People, we believe that measurable results come from genuine human connections and self-awareness; precisely what Insights Discovery facilitates so effectively.

What This Looks Like in Practice

In one of our workshops, we encountered a situation that demonstrates how Insights Discovery transforms team dynamics in ways that directly impact business metrics:

Two high performing team leaders were at odds. They wouldn't talk to each other, creating tension that affected the entire team. The senior manager was frustrated, and the managing director had nearly given up hope, except he requested an Insights Discovery program for the entire group.

Within just 7 hours, both team leaders gained clarity on their differences and understood the root causes of their conflict. The framework gave them a neutral language to have those difficult conversations. By the end of the workshop, these two leaders who couldn’t be in the same room were standing with their hands on each other’s shoulders during the group photo.

This transformation didn’t just improve their relationships but also eliminated communication barriers that were directly impacting team productivity, decision-making speed, and ultimately business outcomes. The kind of outcomes that Indeed’s study quantified in their ROI calculations.

Key Takeaways:

• The Insights Discovery program demonstrates significant ROI, particularly in improving team dynamics, communication, and reducing time to full proficiency

• While the 2063% ROI may be inflated due to methodology limitations, even the more conservative 518% estimate represents exceptional value

• The program’s greatest strength lies in creating team awareness that builds trust and psychological safety;  foundational elements for high-performing teams

• For Thai organizations, the tool offers a fresh alternative to established assessments with strong evidence of practical business impact

Experience the Impact Yourself

If you’re an HR/L&D professional in Thailand curious about how Insights Discovery could transform your teams, we’d love to show you exactly how this tool works in practice!

Join us on June 13th for an immersive session where you'll experience firsthand how improved self-awareness and team dynamics translate into measurable business outcomes.

You’ll get to see the same process that delivered that impressive ROI at Indeed and walk away with practical strategies you can implement immediately.

Limited spots are available, so secure yours today: https://victuspeople.com/live-event/

 

References

• Insights own Blogpost

https://blog.insights.com/en-gb/blog/revealing-the-remarkable-roi-of-insights-discovery-indeed-success-story

• Link to the Study

https://info.insights.com/hubfs/ROI%20Indeed%20Reports/ROI_Evaluation_Summary_V03%5B1%5D.pdf?hsLang=en-us&utm_campaign=ROI%20CTA%20Top%20PDF&utm_source=Other