how should I handle people who don’t pay attention in my trainings?

A reader writes:

My question is around my work as a professional industry trainer. I do training sessions open to being booked for participants across the industry, as well as targeted training in webinar form for single businesses. These sessions are about key aspects of our work, including safety and legislative issues.

The recent letter about students in academic settings whispering in class has really stirred up thoughts about a pattern I’m seeing in these sessions. Participants, often including managers or leaders within a workplace, despite being asked to put their cameras on and participate, keep their cameras off and don’t respond to questions and activities designed to show their learning and help concepts stick.

At the end of the sessions, often there are people who just don’t log out when I’m there for optional question and answer sessions, even when those are finished and others have left, making it clear that they’re logging on, signing in, and then leaving their device unattended. At other times, when I have a group attending together on webinars, I’m seeing participants on their phones, chatting with each other, and again, not participating.

These are adults who are getting paid to do the training, sometimes as a requirement of their role or following directions from regulators, but they’re not my employees and often their managers are in the sessions not taking action. For the sessions where assessment and participation contributes to a pass/fail result, I see this much less, but I still need to have conversations with people each time about being failed for this behavior.

I feel like my hands are tied: I ask them to have their cameras on, remind them these are collaborative sessions and to participate, and give them options from joining by mic, putting questions or comments in chat, and even just using Zoom reactions, and I even point out that the session won’t go over or under time based on their participation.

What would you suggest?

I think you’ve got to get really clear on what you are and aren’t responsible for.

For training sessions where you’re assessing how people do and their participation contributes to whether they pass or fail, make it very clear at the start of the session what your expectations are. For example: “At the end of this training, you will either pass or fail. That will be based on XYZ. I want to stress that your participation today is a key part of passing. Participation means actively engaging with the material by asking questions or putting comments in chat. I want to mention up-front that you risk not passing this class if you are scrolling on your phone, chatting with people not attending the training, or otherwise not actively participating.”

In long sessions, you could also build in opportunities to check in with people who haven’t seemed engaged so far. For example, maybe you do a quick five-minute break after the first hour and use that opportunity to message people whose behavior so far has them on track to fail, to let them know that (and you could ask whether they’d prefer to reschedule for a different session when they’ll be able to devote more attention to it).

But for training sessions where there’s no pass/fail at the end and you’re not charged with producing any kind of final assessment for each participant … in those cases I’d figure they’re adults in charge of their own professional choices and if they choose not to pay attention, that’s between them and their employer. If their behavior is distracting to you or other participants, you should call that out (which might be as simple as asking them to go camera-off until they’re done with whatever they’re doing), but otherwise you can leave it alone.

And of course, as with any training, it’s worth reflecting on whether there’s more you can do on your end to keep people engaged. We’ve all been in trainings where it’s clear we could either read the material or listen the webinar but don’t need to do both, or trainings where the trainer’s style makes it tough to stay totally focused on the content the whole time. If there’s any chance people are feeling that way, that’s a flag to change something about the training design if you can. I’m not saying that’s the case — and hopefully you’re gathering that kind of feedback through evaluations at the end of the sessions — but it’s always worth looking at when you’re seeing multiple people disengaged.

But it’s also true that this is just typical webinar behavior for some people, particularly when they’ve been ordered to attend and might not have much internal motivation to be there.

The post how should I handle people who don’t pay attention in my trainings? appeared first on Ask a Manager.