When companies calculate the return on employee training, they usually look at the person who attended the course.
Did that employee become more productive? Did their work improve? Were they more likely to stay with the organisation?
New research suggests businesses may be overlooking another substantial benefit: what happens to the employee’s manager.
A study published in the Journal of Political Economy found that frontline employees increased their output after completing an intensive workplace training programme. At the same time, those employees required less assistance from their managers, allowing supervisors to spend more time on strategic work.
The researchers estimate that these benefits to managers represented approximately 45% of the total value created by the training programme.
For businesses deciding whether employee development is worth the expense, this suggests conventional return-on-investment calculations may capture only part of the benefit.
A 16-week workplace experiment
Miguel Espinosa of Bocconi University and Christopher Stanton of Harvard Business School studied employees at a Colombian federal regulatory agency.
The research covered 655 employees, consisting of 526 frontline workers and 129 managers. Around 12% of the frontline workforce was selected to complete an intensive training programme in late 2018.
The programme ran for 16 weeks and involved approximately 120 hours of training.
Employees received instruction in practical skills including goal setting, Microsoft Excel, effective writing and Colombian legal analysis. The researchers then compared employee performance before and after the intervention and examined email communication between workers and their supervisors.
That communication data became particularly important.
Improving an employee’s technical ability is useful on its own. But an employee who can also solve more problems independently may reduce the amount of managerial time required to support their work.
Frontline productivity increased by around 10%
The immediate productivity effect was substantial.
Following the programme, trained frontline employees completed approximately 10% more work than before. Managers also increased the proportion of strategic goals they completed by around 3%.
The effect was stronger among managers who worked particularly closely with employees who had received the training.
For those supervisors, productivity increased by approximately 8%.
The researchers found an important change in communication at the same time.
After training, frontline employees sent fewer emails asking their managers for assistance. The evidence suggests that better-trained employees were able to resolve more problems independently, reducing the amount of routine support required from people higher in the organisational hierarchy.
That changes the economics of employee development.
An under-skilled employee does not only produce less work themselves. They can also consume the productive time of colleagues and managers.
Managers are an expensive bottleneck
Managerial time is a limited business resource.
A supervisor who spends part of the day answering routine questions, correcting avoidable mistakes or resolving problems that could have been dealt with by frontline employees has less time available for planning, strategy and higher-value decision-making.
This creates what the researchers describe as a spillover effect.
Training one employee can improve the employee’s own performance while simultaneously increasing the productivity of someone else in the organisation.
The researchers’ model estimated that managerial spillovers accounted for approximately 45% of the programme’s total benefits.
The scale of that effect changes the business case considerably.
Without the additional improvement in managerial productivity, the organisation would have needed to train almost twice as many frontline employees to produce the same overall increase in output.
A business evaluating training only by comparing the direct productivity of trained employees could therefore substantially underestimate its return.
Training also affected careers
The benefits continued beyond the immediate increase in productivity.
Employees who completed the programme were more likely to remain with the organisation over the following three years.
They were also approximately twice as likely to be promoted as employees who had not received the training.
This complicates a common concern around employee development.
Businesses sometimes hesitate to invest heavily in training because employees can take their newly acquired skills elsewhere. But failing to provide development opportunities may itself contribute to employees leaving.
In this case, training was associated with both improved productivity and stronger employee retention.
That does not mean every training programme will produce the same result.
The intervention studied was intensive, lasted four months and focused on skills employees could use directly in their work. The evidence therefore cannot be treated as proof that a short online course or generic annual training session would produce comparable benefits.
What South African businesses can learn
The findings are particularly relevant for South African companies trying to improve productivity while controlling headcount.
Adding another employee is one way to increase capacity.
Improving the ability of the existing workforce may be another.
This matters especially in organisations where managers spend considerable time supporting routine work instead of concentrating on responsibilities that require their experience and authority.
The research suggests businesses should therefore ask more than whether an employee learned something during training.
They should examine whether the employee subsequently became less dependent on managerial intervention.
Useful measures could include the number of issues escalated to supervisors, repeated requests for assistance, rework, avoidable errors and the amount of managerial time spent supporting routine operational tasks.
A successful training programme may reduce these costs even when they do not appear directly on an income statement.
Better skills can change the organisation itself
There is also a broader implication.
Organisational hierarchies partly exist because employees need people with greater knowledge or authority to solve problems they cannot resolve themselves.
If employees become more capable, the amount of supervision required may change.
Stanton argues that increasingly scalable training technologies, including tools supported by artificial intelligence, could make employees more self-sufficient and potentially allow organisations to operate with less managerial oversight.
That does not mean businesses can simply train employees and remove managers.
The study examined one organisation, and managerial roles involve considerably more than answering employee questions.
But it does highlight an important relationship that businesses often fail to include when evaluating employee development.
Training does not create value only when workers learn to do more.
It can also create value when their managers no longer need to do as much for them.
Source Information
Study Title: Training, Communications Patterns, and Spillovers inside Organizations
Authors: Miguel Espinosa and Christopher Stanton
Journal: Journal of Political Economy
Publication: July 2026
DOI: 10.1086/740219
