Setting Expectations: One of the most effective tactics that is often overlooked
As I travel the world presenting for clients and at conferences, one question that I am often asked is how to ensure high response rate and high quality feedback from individuals after their training—90 days after their training. Organisations are not necessarily expecting great results, many of them are OK with challenges/areas to do better in so they can adjust and implement strategies to help. However, the state of affairs is often low percentages responding and those that respond do not elaborate much.
There are many strategies to help this, I will focus on one. Simply setting the expectations! If you get three questions 90-days after a learning event asking you what percent were you able to apply, what the challenges were and what were the enablers, many organisations are surprised by the results in terms of how low response rate are and how low the quality of data. But they never told individuals what will happen. Consider letting your target audience know:
- The nature of the training and why
- The strategic fit to a corporate core competency
- The importance of the course end evaluations
- It’s a two way street—the organisation is investing in them but expect them to apply what they learned and contribute to a measureable impact
- There will be a follow up conducted 90 days after the training to assess the above mentioned three questions
This does not have to be hard. A simple message can accomplish the above and you will be amazed how much of a difference it makes. One of our clients did this in a 4 minute video clip that plays at the beginning of each training class—powerful!
