What the feedback form tells you about a training session, and what it doesn't

Every one of the sessions ends with a paper form. Participants fill it in before they leave, and the results come to you whatever they say. I put that on the home page because a buyer should be able to see what the room thought without me filtering it, and because a young practice with no track record has no business hiding its feedback. If you are trying to work out how to evaluate a training session, though, or measuring training effectiveness is part of your job, you should know what that form can tell you and what it can't.

The form measures the afternoon

A form filled in before people leave records what the room felt before people left. Whether the time felt well spent. Whether people were on their feet and working, or watching. Whether they would want more of it. That is real information. If the room switched off, you will see it on the form. If a few people disliked it and most didn't, you will see that too, and you can decide what to make of it.

It is also an early warning. The guarantee runs for seven days after the session. You don't need the form to use it, but when you are deciding whether the afternoon was worth the fee it helps to have the room's view in writing.

What the form can't do is tell you anything about Monday. Nobody filling it in has had a Monday yet. They haven't been back in the meeting where the usual people do most of the talking, and they don't know whether they will let an unfinished idea finish this time. Neither do I. A form at the end of the day is a measure of the day, and that is all I claim for it.

What a good afternoon proves

A good afternoon is not hard to produce. People standing, working in pairs, using each other's names inside five minutes. Most rooms respond to that and the form will show it. It is worth something, but it is the same thing an activity day produces, and the sessions are meant to do something an activity day doesn't.

A form that comes back warm tells you the session cleared the first bar. It says very little about the second one, which is the one you were paying for.

Set the measure before you book

The measure that works is the one you set before anybody stands up. On the pre-call I ask what you want the session to change, and the answer sets the content. It also sets the test. If the answer was that the same two people stop dominating every meeting, you have a measure that is specific to your team, and you can check it yourself in three weeks without any form at all.

If you can't answer that question before booking, no form afterwards will answer it for you, which is why the call comes before the quote.

What tells you whether it worked

I'm not in your meetings afterwards, so the things that show whether the session took are things you can see and I can't.

The first is the Monday question, asked again. The Taster ends with a debrief that asks each person what they will do differently on Monday, and the other sessions are built on the same sequence. Three weeks later, ask the same question of the room, or of the manager who sits in it, and listen to whether the answer names anything.

The second is the vocabulary. A team comes out of a session with a few words for what it practised. Somebody says "that's a block" halfway through a meeting. Somebody says "let it finish". If those words are turning up in meetings a month later, the session is still working. If nobody has used one of them since the day, it didn't take, whatever the form said.

Neither of these is a measurement in the sense a dashboard is. They are things a manager who sits in the meeting can notice, and I'd rather give you those than invent a number.

What I don't know yet

This is a young practice. I have a form, a guarantee and a debrief that asks the Monday question, and I don't have a longer measure than that yet. It seems better to tell you that here than to let a feedback summary imply something it can't. What I can promise is that the form comes to you whatever it says, the fee comes back if the room decides it wasn't worth it, and the question you need in order to evaluate the session is the one I ask you on the call before anything is booked.

Each format on the sessions page says what it is built to change, and three weeks on, that is what to hold the session against.