Top tips to elevate employee programs
At the end of the first day of a successful conference, the organizer asked, “What’s the one thing I can do to improve this gathering before Day 2?”
She was inundated with feedback forms, articles, and advice and wanted to cut to the chase and implement a quick win. But what, she wondered.
Over the course of many conversation and consulting sessions, I’ve heard from many folks who are eager to learn the most impactful and actionable strategies that will elevate their gatherings and employee programs, whether they be Town Halls, New Hire Orientations, Offsites, Trainings, and more.
Behind this request is often a desire to save time and bandwidth, increase scale, or increase engagement. More than anything, these tips aim to ensure the change we are seeking to make with these gatherings actually sticks.
Check out my top tips for each of your common gathering types below:
Town Halls or All-Hands: Create effect agendas
Typical agenda slides look like the agenda on the left (content agendas). They highlight the content you’re sharing. While helpful, they unfortunately make it easy for people to tune out when a section isn’t relevant to them, especially virtually.
Instead of crafting an agenda slide based on topics or content, craft one based on context, the outcome, and effect. Effect agendas help ensure the content you spend so long creating is retained and clearly communicated.
Here are a few ways to do this:
Chunk your content into outcomes. Tell attendees what they will walk away with and what will be different from your time together. Pro-tip: Use this in your invitations as well.
Instead of a list of sessions or topics, share the what, the how, and the why “Here’s what you’ll walk away with, here’s how we’re going to get there, and why this matters to you”
Instead of topics, think of your agenda like a recipe. What is each step leading the attendees towards? Show them how all of the topics connect to one another and what the final product is.
Difficulty creating an “effect agenda” may highlight a need to clarify the All-Hands objectives further. Remember if you’re not clear on what you want your employees to walk away with, they won’t be clear either.
New Hire Orientations: Shift from content to questions
“We need 30 minutes!” read the marked-urgent email. “It’s important employees know this on Day 1,” read another. It’s common for onboarding programs to be packed to the brim, often because we face mounting pressure to add more or risk saying “no.” The bigger an organization gets, the more departments that want to take part.
Yet, like many gatherings, new hire orientations succeed not because of quantity but quality.
Make content creation more purposeful than personal. One way is to remove department overviews from your new hire orientation. Every organization has a legal or finance department. Instead, focus on what makes your organization unique.
Ask yourself, what 3-5 questions does your onboarding program need to answer to help new hires increase their productivity and confidence?
Perhaps it’s questions like how you make money, what key projects teams are working on, and how departments work with each other. Screenwriters call this “the central question”. This communication device piques curiosity and clarifies the ‘so what’ to keep people engaged to the very end.
Turning content into questions makes it easier to say “no” to sessions that don’t meet your objectives (consider adding others to an on-demand playlist for employees to watch on their own time). Plus, this way, presenters can come and go as your organization scales, but the foundation of your program will stay solid for the long term.
Training classes: See them first
“What do I need to know about you?”. The answers flew across the room, one after the other. “We like discussion”, “We covered concepts 3-6 last week”, and “Some of us are new to the company”.
On the second-to-last day of a packed training session, a different facilitator appeared. Rather than plow through with the material, they turned the class from a solo into a duet with a simple opening question. The facilitator didn’t wildly change the lesson plan or the slide deck. They simply “saw them first”.
Seeing people first means seeing and recognizing your participants. Yet, we often skip this step.
Instead, we dive right into pre-planned material created without participants' control or contribution.
What do participants want? What is at stake for them? What do we need to know about them? Knowing these answers helps make the content more relevant, applicable, and personal, which increases its chances of sticking.
This device also helps elevate your participants' status, building their confidence and efficacy in the material and leveraging their expertise.
Here are a few ways to do this:
After showing an agenda slide, ask, “What have I missed?” or “What else were you hoping to learn?”
Ask, “What do we already know about this topic?”
Ask, “What does this topic make you think about?”
More than creating something for others, gatherings aim to be about others. It’s not just made for us; it’s made about us.
Offsites: Land the plane
Many offsites don’t land the plane, aka they don’t bring the gathering home.
Our job when we gather isn't just to share content. It's to close the gap between the info we share and someone's ability (and motivation) to do something with it. Landing the plane ensures ROI. For off-sites, this means to:
Spend as much time learning "it" as you do discussing "us", and how you'll work together because of what did. How will we go forward because of what we’ve learned together? How will we work together because of what we’ve learned?
Discuss what could get in the way of the content sticking
Have employees teach back or teach each other what they learned. What are a-ha’s and takeaways?
Clarify decisions, next steps, or calls to action, and summarize key points. Have the group get specific with each other about what comes next and what could get in the way. The difference between an informed versus engaged offsite is often this lack of reflection. I call it education without implementation.
Educator and scholar John Dewey said it best, “We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”
Offsites alone don’t necessarily lead to learning—it’s the reflection and processing that do. We often pump our offsites so full of content that we leave little space or time for reflection and application.
Manager training: Use critical incidents
It’s common to pump our management and leadership programs with concepts, theories, and frameworks. While those can be helpful in moderation, their impact increases when introduced via or alongside critical incidents.
Critical incidents are real-life examples, moments, case studies, or stories. Think of it as learning by example.
Critical incidents make concepts feel more real and concrete and bring the material closer to use personally. This is one reason why the COVID pandemic started to feel more real and impactful once Tom Hanks was diagnosed, or the NBA season was canceled. More people started to pay attention because they now had proof, that the impact was closer to them.
Instead of a checklist of items you’ll cover, start from a series of critical incidents and impact how those will be different after the program or class is over.
Build your program from stories and real-life needs.
Survey participants for their critical incidents and build case studies around them to use and practice during classes.
This method helps employees apply concepts and frameworks and allows them to test their progress and skill-building against real-life examples that matter to them.
Lindsey Caplan is a screenwriter turned organizational psychologist who helps HR & business leaders create experiences that boost motivation, engagement, and performance