5 easy ways to keep participants engaged before, during and after sessions

More or less all of our training programs aim to create some kind of change in behavior. Whether the goal is implementing new knowledge, complying with new rules or embracing aspects of our corporate culture, encouraging and ultimately achieving behavioral shifts is at the heart of virtually everything we do.

So, how do we do this? In this article I will share five practical, helpful tips on how to drive behavioral shifts.

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What to keep in mind when hosting training sessions

This article focuses specifically on changing behaviors as a result of training sessions, than can be hosted both in person and online. We will go over five ways you can increase the likelihood the time together will make a real impact on your participants and their future behavior.

Naturally, there are also many other ways of creating behavioral shifts in organizations, but we’ll leave those to future articles.

All five tools are designed with one specific purpose in mind: making sure your participants are engaged. More importantly, the goal is to make people more involved not just during the actual sessions but also before, between and after them. After all, the point is for participants to eventually adopt the new behaviors in their natural working environment. If we can keep participants engaged even while they are at work, behavioral shifts will usually happen naturally.

These suggestions are especially well suited to Knowly users, but they can also be implemented entirely without system support, although with a bit more effort required.

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1. Send presentations, clips and other materials both before and after sessions

Sending materials before, between and after sessions makes participants much more involved than if training only takes place in the classroom setting.

Creating a higher level of engagement and maintaining it over a longer time drastically increases the likelihood that the training actually achieves its aim and makes a lasting impact on your participants.

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Sub-aim

• Build curiosity and enthusiasm for your training program.
• Make participants look back at their training, the insights they gained, and what changes they’ve seen in everyday life.
• Make participants engage with the content beforehand, so that more progress can be made during the session itself.

Examples of materials to send

• Simple “selfie-video” where the session host(s) introduce themselves and talk about the content briefly.
• A few weeks after the training program has finished, send the same PowerPoint that was shown in the classroom and add some questions to reflect on.
• Send one or more YouTube clips with famous speakers addressing the concepts covered in the training program.

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2. Set aside 15–20 minutes of the session for writing an action plan

An action plan is a way of compiling several powerful tools for changing behavior in one convenient format. The following important concepts can all be checked off if you set aside 20–30 minutes towards the end of a training session for creating an action plan.

• Transfer planning: How I as a participant will transfer what I have learned from the training program to my own daily life.
• Coping planning: I as a participant set aside time to predict potential obstacles in everyday life that will prevent me from implementing my new behavior in practice.
• Transfer motivation: I as a participant set aside time to reflect on why the training is important to me, by visualizing a future situation that motivates me.

Example of a simple but effective action plan

• Question 1: Suppose that [3 weeks] have passed since the training program finished, and you feel like you’ve really achieved your goal – what has happened to make you feel that way?
• Question 2: What are 2–3 things that could prevent you from reaching the point you envisioned in question 1?
• Question 3: How might you handle the obstacles you described in question 2?
• Question 4: What are 2–4 concrete steps you could take over the next week towards reaching your goal?

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3. Send three reflection questions once a week after the training program has finished

Research has shown that reflection is key to learning effectively and successfully establishing lasting changes in behavior.

But why is it so hard to build a habit of reflection, when all it takes is just a few minutes a week?

Stanford researcher BJ Fogg explains that there are three factors that must align in order for new behavior to happen and eventually develop into a habit:

• Prompt/trigger: Something that reminds you to perform the behavior now

• Ability: You are capable of performing the behavior

• Motivation: You want to perform the behavior

He goes on to explain that those of us who want to encourage the change in behavior should mainly focus on influencing the first two factors – trigger and ability. We can create triggers in daily life, and we can make the behavior easier to perform, but motivation tends to come from within and is more difficult to influence.

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How reflection questions make a huge difference

To get your participants to reflect more – and more regularly – you should therefore try to…

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Trigger reflection in your participants

How to do it: Send an e-mail or text message along the lines of

“Time for this week’s moment of reflection, where you reflect on the progress you’ve made since attending the training program [New as a manager].

Do you feel like you haven’t made any progress? No problem! Reflection is even more crucial if you feel like you haven’t made the strides you’d hoped.”

Note the last sentence here, aimed directly at participants who are stuck. Guilting them might make them give up entirely, so always avoid that.

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Make it easier for your participants to perform the reflection

Send a link to reflection questions or simply include them in your text message or e-mail. Having clear questions to answer makes things much easier and less abstract than being asked to just “reflect on what you’ve learned”.

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Tip for Knowly users: Schedule sending reflection questions ahead of time, so it happens regularly without you having to remember to do it every time.

Use the feature “Show answers”, where every participant can see their answers from last week’s reflection. That way, every participant can clearly see the progress they’ve made, which breeds motivation and makes it easier to formulate new steps for the coming week.

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The following questions are a good starting point for developing a habit of reflection. The fact that there are only a few of them is all to the good, as small behaviors are easier to adopt.

• Question 1: Think about the point you want to reach and reflect on [this past week] – what signs of progress have you noticed? Example: Something you’ve successfully done, something you’ve observed or something someone has said to you
• ‍Question 2: Continue to have your goal in mind. What are 1–2 steps you could take this next [week]?
• ‍Question 3: What’s a tiny step you could take right away? Example: Adding something to your calendar, setting an alarm on your phone, writing yourself a post-it note.

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4. Hand out a group assignment to be done at home

Learning in social contexts has a variety of positive effects, especially when it comes to “soft” skills like leadership, coaching and other interpersonal skills.

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Why social learning is important for learning and practice

• Skills involving other people (for example all forms of conversation) are difficult to practice without actually involving others.
• It’s difficult to get immediate feedback when practicing on your own.
• Feeling like we belong to a group and that the exercise is something that we’re all doing together tends to make us more motivated.
• Asking for help and getting it is much easier in group exercises than when you’re practicing on your own.
• In contexts where learning mostly happens on a group level, for example with certain collaborative skills, group exercises are really the only way of practicing.

So, how can you incorporate social learning in your training program? We strongly recommend some kind of group exercise, for the following reasons:

• Easy to create. The participants do most of the work.
• Clear activity. The participants don’t have to come up with what to do on their own, which makes the exercise easier to complete.

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How to organize a group assignment

1. Divide the participants into groups. It’s best to do this beforehand and inform the participants which groups they’ve been assigned to during the session, so everyone has a chance to get to know each other.
2. Encourage the group members to set an appointment to meet. Try to make them add it to their calendars during the session.
3. Describe what to prepare before they meet, what to do while they’re all gathered and what (if anything) they should report back to you. Assign a group leader to keep things organized – sharing that responsibility often leads to a lack of structure.

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Tip for Knowly users: The activity Group assignment can be added to your teaching journey, with tools that participants can use to coordinate their schedules, chat and provide you with freedback.

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5. Send an e-mail to the participants’ managers before the session

Manager involvement is one of the single most important keys to a successful training program. A supportive manager who shows interest can have a huge positive impact, while an uninterested manager can completely thwart an otherwise well-executed program.

However, manager involvement is easier said than done. There are many reasons for this, three of the main ones being:

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Why it’s hard to get managers involved

• Managers have very limited time.
• Managers don’t realize how important they are to successful training and assume that the program organizers should provide all the necessary support.
• Managers don’t know the aim of the program and are therefore not sure how they can provide support.

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The solution: Send a single e-mail to the manager

Fortunately all three of these issues can be addressed with one single e-mail. Granted, a greater effort might address them even further, but the following e-mail takes you a very long way.

Just replace the information in brackets – the rest is ready to send.

Dear [Anna],

Tomorrow, your co-worker [Lucy] will take part in the training program [New to management]. As [Lucy’s manager] you have a very important role to play, and that is to help [Lucy] get going back at work once the training is finished.

I know you have a very busy schedule, so all you have to do is this:

1. Ask [Lucy], in person or via e-mail or text message, what [she] hopes to get out of the training program. Tell [her] why you think it is a good idea for [her] to take part in the training program – getting that approval from the manager can have a major impact on motivation.
2. When [Lucy] comes back, ask [her] about [her] most important insights from the program and how you can help [her] achieve the goals [she] has set for [herself].

These interactions need only take 5–10 minutes each – just being involved in some way is what matters.

If you would like to know more about what the program entails I have enclosed a brief summary of what will be covered.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Best regards,

[your name]

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Why the e-mail can make a major difference

• Makes it clear that the manager plays an important role.
• Shows that you respect the manager’s time (both explicitly and by not asking for something that takes a lot of time).
• Gives concrete things to do, which makes involvement easier than a more abstract request of “providing support”.
• High “bang for your buck”: Just a few minutes before and after the program can boost the co-worker’s motivation during training and make them much more likely to eventually achieve their goals.
• Addresses the issue of not knowing what the training program is about (with an enclosed file).

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There you have it – five easy ways to keep participants engaged before, during and after sessions.

Naturally, these can all be expanded, given more time and made more advanced, but just by doing one or two of the things outlined above, you have taken major steps towards making sure your training program will actually create lasting change.

Interested in how you can use Knowly to get people more engaged in your training programs? Book an introductory meeting and let’s talk about what your organization might need.