Reinforce the teaching
Even the best training will fall flat if there’s no follow-up to reinforce it.
The first step is gathering immediate feedback with a reaction survey, what Rybka refers to as “level-one metrics.” Your basic evaluation should include questions like: Were the materials useful? Was the facilitator informative? How did you feel about the length and the pace of the session?
“And we do get some good feedback there, if the room was too hot or cold,” Rybka jokes. “But it’s really that post-session follow-up where you’re asking the manager if they have demonstrated any new skills or if you’ve driven it to a level-four assessment, and you can see it in their business results.”
But it’s tricky to calculate a single session’s impact on the results of the whole company or even a specific department. So your best bet may be to bring the program’s effectiveness down to an individual level by following up with each participant.
Have all the employees who participated in the training set one or two goals based on the session. By doing that, you are empowering them to adapt the session to their needs, getting their buy-in on what is most important to them and building a way to check their progress afterward.
“Ask for the learner to decide what they’re going to do to further that [material you presented],” she says. “So in other words, I’m not going to say, ‘Everybody take this action plan and go revamp your performance goals,’ but, ‘OK, here’s the expectation. Here are the tools. Here’s an example of what it looks like. Now, you tell me: What would you like to do to improve this skill?’ Then it’s their plan.”
The biggest key to measuring the success of your program is knowing what you’re measuring before you begin. And that can often be half the battle.
“Getting [executives] to say what success looks like is a painful exercise. They’ll usually defer to, ‘Oh, I’ll know it when I’ll see it,’” Rybka says. “You’ve really got to say, ‘Hold up. What do we expect people to be able to do when they walk out?’”
How to reach: Westfield Group, (800) 243-0210 or
www.westfieldinsurance.com
