Good News Travels Fast: Virtual Training Tip #4

by Mark Douglas

January 30, 2018

Tip 4 of 7 part series on “7 Tips for Expanding Virtual Training Within your organization’

Recently we shared 7 Tips for Helping Expand Use of Virtual Training Within Your Organization. As a part of a series, we’re going in-depth on each of these 7 topics.

This week, we tackle tip #4 – Good news travels fast: It seems that everyone these days is going online now to read reviews before they patronize a restaurant (Yelp), a company (Glassdoor), or where they travel (TripAdvisor). Your best (and easiest) marketing to drive adoption is your current employees. If they find the training useful and engaging, they will no doubt tell all of their work friends and colleagues about it, and it spreads like wildfire. Always be sure to ask for feedback at the end of each session from your attendees, and consider highlighting one or two positive comments in an employee newsletter or company all-hands Meeting.

In my role as a Customer Success Manager at CoSo Cloud, I am always looking at ways to help leverage our customers’ success stories with virtual training to spread best practices to our other customers (and potential customers!). Customers won’t necessarily believe what I say (since I work for the company!), but they are more apt to listen to an actual story from an actual customer about how they used Adobe Connect to successfully leverage their training needs.

It’s undeniable – feedback (both positive and negative!) is a good thing. It helps us determine what we need to keep doing well, and what we may need to adjust, based on the perception of our customer (internal and external).

It’s the same concept with your internal customers – your employees. Best believe they are talking to each other every day about what they like (and dislike) about your company. And internal development and training is no exception. Considering that most internal training is staggered over multiple days/sessions to accommodate different departments, schedules, and time zones, it’s logical to assume that those departments/locations that are trained first will discuss the training to their curious colleagues who have yet to be trained. And the more positive things that your attendees have to convey to their colleagues, the more it will drum up excitement and optimism for these future sessions.

In fact, an American Express Survey showed that Americans tell an average of 9 people about good experiences, and tell 16 (nearly two times more) people with poor experiences!

We recommend requesting some feedback after each training session (which can be done via Adobe Connect’s polling feature). What did each attendee find useful about the session, and what would they change for next time? (For example, was the session too long? Not focused enough? Did it offer enough interactivity to make it useful?) As you collect feedback, you will be able to see if a majority of attendees felt the same way about certain topics, and you can adjust your session to address those concerns before conducting the next session.

Remember the acronym: ABA! (Always Be Adjusting!)

We all want training to be beneficial for our employees. And the more we can use constructive feedback to tailor and adjust the sessions to maximize interest, engagement, and internal advocacy, the more successful they will be in the long run.

 

Other Articles in this Series:

Original Article: 7 Tips for Helping Expand Use of Virtual Training Within Your Organization

Tip #1: WIIFM

Tip #2: Start at the Top

Tip #3: Timing is Everything

Tip #4: Good News Travels Fast

Tip #5: Bad News Travels Even Faster

Tip #6: Making It Fun

Tip #7: Understand and Monitor Usage