The DOs and DON’Ts of Engaging Training
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Training is a critical part of any business, and effective and engaging training can be the key to retaining top talent. But training that falls flat and bores your new employees or doesn’t engage them will have them second guessing their decision to join your company.
Here are the Do’s and Don’ts of engaging training to ensure that you’re onboarding gets your new hires excited to be a part of your team:
DO Make it Interactive
If you want to keep your team engaged, insert opportunities for interactivity into your training. Encouraging interactivity will keep your employees from getting bored or overwhelmed with the materials.
Look at your current training plan, and identify places of the training where you can loop in your new hires. Have them do writing exercises or team building activities and make sure to ask them questions along the way to encourage participation.
DON’T Talk At Your Team
The quickest way to lose employee engagement during training is to do nothing but talk at them for hours on end. For most people, lectures are an ineffective teaching method and your team will likely tune you out shortly after you begin your presentation and all of your training content will be lost.
DO Print Materials
For every training, you should have a number of printed materials for your team. These can be printouts of your presentation with space to talk notes, supplemental materials for them to read more thoroughly at home or worksheets/quizzes for them to fill out after the training wraps up.
Print materials (especially ones that involve writing exercises) can help your team to retain the information from your training and keep them more engaged during and after.
DON’T Overwhelm Your Team With Too Much Collateral
While having print collateral to pass out to your team is a training DO, giving them so many materials that they feel completely overwhelmed and shut down is a training DON’T. Overwhelming your team with too many papers, booklets, training guides, presentation print outs and additional collateral can make it difficult for them to absorb and retain the knowledge in each.
All training sessions are different and require a different amount of materials in order to be effective, so you’ll have to use your discretion to determine how much is too much, but a good rule of thumb is to give your team one to two core pieces of printed collateral to tackle DURING the training and one to two pieces of printed collateral to tackle AFTER the training.

Try not to make your audience sit through long sessions!
DO Divide Your Training Into Manageable Sections
One of the keys to keeping your employees engaged during the training process is to break it down into manageable pieces. You’ll notice that the longer you make your trainings, the less engages your employees will be as you move through it. People tend to have short attention spans, and sitting through an 8 hour training can feel overwhelming and unmanageable.
To keep your team engaged, break down your training into smaller, more manageable modules, and make sure to give them breaks in between subjects. So, for example, if you were doing a day of training on social media, you might break it into a morning session to cover social media platforms, an early afternoon session to cover corporate policies and procedures and a late afternoon session to cover general social media do’s and don’ts with a few breaks scattered between. Structuring your training in this way will help you keep your employees attention.
DON’T Try To Power Through Everything At Once
There’s no need to power through everything you might need to train your new hires on in one sitting. Spread your training out over the course of days or weeks to avoid burning out your new hires and lessening their enthusiasm about their new role and company.
How Can We Help?
At Rogue Print and Mail, our proven track record of delivering the highest quality graphic design and print services to professionals speaks for itself. With fast turnaround times, industry specific templates and designs, an online portal available for any groups that wish to work with us to be able to store and manipulate their templates, and an in-house team to guide you in all of your branding, design and printing needs, Rogue Print and Mail is the preferred design and print partner for many hundreds of professionals across Australia.
I sincerely hope that you found this information valuable. For advice on effective branding, design and cross media marketing, please don’t hesitate to call me on 1300 65 85 00 or email me at paul.stenhouse@rogueprintandmail.com.au to arrange an obligation free 10 minute discussion with a member of our expert team.