60 Ideas in 60 Minutes

At our chapter meeting on Friday morning, January 23, Cindy Schisler facilitated an exercise designed to generate lots of useful training tips. Here are the ideas we shared.

1. Getting people back from break on time - Each team has a set of questions and your team cannot start working on the questions until all team members have returned from break. Prizes are awarded for teams who answer the questions first and correctly. This technique encourages everyone to return from break on time. After all, no one wants to be responsible for holding their group back from winning prizes.

2. Keeping the group on track – establish a “parking lot” in the beginning of the session for issues that arise but cannot be addressed at that time. The “parking lot” holds thoughts that are important but don’t fit the agenda for the day. If time allows, the group can revisit the issues in the “parking lot.” This prevents digressing and lets the person know their thought has not been lost.

3. Icebreaker - Each participant is handed a panel from a comic strip (cutting comic strips from the paper works well). Everyone is asked to move around the room to find all the people needed to complete their comic strip. This technique can be used for creating partners, triads, or small groups.

4. Spice up the webinar experience – Create a webinar team, complete with a facilitator, web technician, and speaker. The speaker and facilitator interact much like a radio talk show…bantering back and forth. Be sure to articulate the skills, knowledge, and attitude you would like participants to gain from the webinar. Clearly identify what’s in it for them to participate (the WIIFT factor).

5. When conducting mandatory workshops – have every person make it a personal goal to leave the session with another goal other than that the class was mandatory.

6. Memory tip – the first and last things are what people remember the most. Make your opening memorable. In closing a session, ask everyone to share their biggest, most positive take away of the day. This concludes the session on a positive note and refreshes the memories of those in the class.

7. SimpleTruths.com – visit simpletruths.com for short pieces of motivation, themes, etc. to add variety to a course.

8. Student attention – keep participants’ attention but using humor, video clips, cartoons, YouTube clips, etc.

9. Action back on the job – Provide participants with “commitment cards” that ask each person to identify what they will do differently back in the workplace as a result of the training program. Each person writes their commitment on two cards (one for themselves and one for the trainer). They share their commitment with the class and give one card to the trainer. The trainer then follows up with each participant to discuss how they are doing toward attaining their commitment.

10. Generating buy-in from participants - Get input from the groups participating in the session beforehand. Find out what they believe would be helpful for them to know about a specific topic. Open the session by showing how you have built what they wanted to learn into the session. Asking for feedback before the session gets a certain level of buy-in before they walk in the room. Sharing how you have incorporated the feedback builds greater buy-in after they’re in the room.

11. More buy-in – anytime a participant can associate something with who they are, you increase your odds for buy-in. If a participant sees some of his or her ideas incorporated in a program, they will be more inclined to buy into the concept.

12. Training pilots – when possible, pilot a session and ask for honest feedback from participants.

13. Authenticity is critical – identify why the training will benefit them. Clarifying your expectations of participants is critical.

14. Training teams – create training teams within various areas throughout the organization. Ask people in different departments to help put together the training program. You can create groups based on functional area, level of management, etc.

15. Customer training – take training beyond employees to client base, as a customer benefit. Educating the clients makes it easier for the workforce to do their job.

16. Dividing the audience – purposely mix participants up in a training class. Divide people into groups using playing cards. Create four different groups: hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades by shuffling cards and passing them out.

17. Use music – to energize participants. Select funny and appropriate songs such as, “Welcome to the Jungle” as participants arrive.

18. A just-in-time team building activity – have regularly scheduled small group huddles to share information and communicate during the workday. This process has been known as informal learning. Refer to the white paper “Learning at the moment of Need” by Bob Mosher.

19. Reduce loneliness in online learning – help people feel as though they are part of a group in a self-paced, self-study online learning environment, give participants the sense that others have taken and are taking the course. After participants have completed a course, ask them to respond to a questionnaire that gives them the opportunity to share their experiences during the process, i.e. what they learned, how it has benefited them, etc. Provide a way for new participants to view feedback from previous participants before they begin their online learning course.

20. Employee on-boarding – create a training manager and manager/supervisor partnership in rolling out a new employee on-boarding process.

21. Create opportunities with your organization – to address the projected 3 to 5 year job and career rotation, create internal job opportunities for promotion and movement within the same organization.

22. Learning styles – continue to look for creative ways to reach various learning styles, i.e. blended learning approaches and strategies.

23. Use video – show participants in a training course a clip from a movie. Ask them to respond/react to the scenario incorporating the principles shared in the class. Ask participants to send their responses via email, using their phone or laptop. Open up your email and project it for the entire class to review and critique, on-the-spot.

24. Podcasts – create podcasts as an approach to blended learning.

25. Stock photos – a resource for legally showing photos and using other media in a learning platform is: http://www.istockphoto.com/

26. Reduce stress – use your organization’s healthcare provider in offering various opportunities for reducing stress in the workplace.

27. Involving top managers – if it is not possible to have top level line managers present parts of training programs, consider having them create a podcast or create a dvd of them commenting on the value associated with key elements contained in the learning program.

28. Marketing – a marketing idea is to visit organizations and offer them free attendance at a workshop. This gives potential clients an opportunity to see the quality of services a vendor can provide.

29. Survey your audience - gain a greater understanding of your participants and their needs prior to their participation in a program by utilizing survey software such as http://www.zoomerang.com/ and http://www.surveymonkey.com/.

30. Visit Clancy Cross’s blog – http://www.clancycross.wordpress.com/, for short writing pieces based around inspirational themes. They can offer a springboard for discussion in a learning environment.

31. Take people off-site to do workshops – use a Pixar short to set the mood for the workshop.

32. Engage your participants beforehand - moving them from spectators into participants by asking them to complete pre-work before class (readings, exercises, etc.). Since people have minimal training time available, asking them to complete pre-work can cut down on training time.

33. Executive sponsorship – add credibility to your programs by having someone from the top show how your learning efforts tie to the organization’s strategic plan, speaks volumes.

34. Lunch and learns with plant tours – stagger sessions throughout the day, rather than offering them at one specific time.

35. The “Bad Apple” Effect – the reality of a bad apple ruining the dynamics of a classroom was discussed. The NPR radio show “This American Life” has a “bad apple” podcast that contains statistics concerning the impact of negative attitude on a group. The episode was aired on December 19th and it's titled, "Ruining It for the Rest of Us." – see http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1275. To hear the episode or any part of it, click the link above and then on the web page click the link on the left labeled "Full episode". [The bad apple research is in the prologue at the beginning of the program, but listen to the entire show - especially the hilarious comedy routine by Mike Birbiglia in Act 2.]
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