Episode 090: Create Engaging Trainings

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show.

3, 2, 1.

We are a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

Hey everyone, and welcome to the Fleet Success Show. I'm your number one today, Jeff Jenkins, pitch-hitting for Josh Turley, who is unavailable today to join us in the podcast. However, we've got somebody that's going to knock your socks off when it comes to our topic today. We've got Kim Dyer joining us all the way from New Mexico. Albuquerque, right, Kim?

Close enough. I'm just on the— I'm on the nicer side of New Mexico in Rio Rancho. But don't tell anybody I said that.

So Kim is a training specialist, like she knows all things training. So we thought what would be good in today's environment is to talk about creating engaging trainings, right, within your fleet, within your departments, to help you guys hopefully, you know, be able to present something that your employees can take away. A lot of time in trainings, especially, you know, the ones that I'm used to when it came to trucking, a lot of times in trainings what we would do is we'd sit everybody in a room and we'd show a video, we'd have trainings, and people would walk out and they would be numb walking out because, one, either there was too much information, two, there wasn't enough information, it wasn't engaging enough. I mean, there's a lot of things that can go wrong with training. So, you know, Kim is kind of going to help us walk through, first of all, the 5 critical components to create an effective training, and then we're going to talk a little bit about just different activities and maybe some challenges that, that you're facing between on-site versus virtual trainings. You know, we're in this world now where a lot is virtual, and it makes it even harder for people to actually pick up trainings because of all the distractions that may be around them when they're on a virtual space. So, Kim, let's, let's really just dive into this, right? Let's, let's start with number 1. What do we got?

Well, I mean, Jeff, first of all, 5 critical components for effective training, right? One of the, one of the biggest things that we talk about, and you mentioned it earlier, was people walking out feeling numb. And usually, that's because is we didn't do a very good job at engaging them. And there's a, there's a lot of reasons why that may happen. And the cool thing about creating engaging training is you don't have to be a training specialist. I mean, you don't have to spend the hours in a classroom like I did, you know, crying yourself to sleep at night trying to figure out activities. You don't have to do that. There's just, there's a couple of things that you have to remember. And the first one that I always like to point out is that a lot of people think that training is the golden ticket. Right? We're gonna go see Willy Wonka, we're gonna have a good time with the candy and the chocolate. But it isn't. Training is not the sole solution. So do not think for one instant, no matter how great your training is, I don't care how awesome you are, it is not going to solve all of your behavioral changes or all of your knowledge changes. It's a tool in a toolbox that you have to leverage appropriately before it becomes effective and you see behavioral changes. So that would be the first one. Don't, don't think that it's the only thing. What?

You're telling us that there's not a silver bullet?

No, no.

All right.

Just like there's no special pill that's going to help me lose this, like, 50 pounds that I need. I wish, you know. You know, it took a lot of work for me to put the pounds on. It's going to take a lot of work to take the pounds off. So no silver bullet. I'm sorry. This isn't, this isn't Supernatural. Salt and burn it. No. So training isn't the sole solution. The next one would be, if you want to be effective, you have to identify your key learning objectives. And that's a lot of fancy fancy big words, ooh, makes you go, ooh, shiny. But really what we're saying is whenever you're training or considering doing a training, there's a behavior that you're trying to fix. OK. You're wanting people to act a certain way or do a certain set of steps, whatever it is. There's a behavior change. And it can't be broad. So for example, if you were to say, well, I want, you know, everybody to be able to fix this particular part on a vehicle. That's really broad. What are the key actions that they need to know? What are the key behaviors they need to understand before that end result can happen? So that's a bit more—

So are you advocating, yeah, so are you advocating basically starting at the basic level, just basic steps, or are you advocating for more, like, area-specific training?

Yeah, you could do, you could do both. But the key thing here is You know, when you're dealing with something more technical, right? If I'm trying to repair something on a vehicle, it's very technical, right? If I'm talking about something like, "Hey, I want to increase my sales pipeline," or "I want to increase my—" or "I want to decrease my implementation timeline, getting people up to speed," very different set of steps and criteria that you need, right? So to think very specifically about what are the key behaviors, what are the key objectives within that overarching goal? So if I were to say, "I want to increase my sales," more closures, right? That's great. But Jeff, how many things go into that? How many things go into successfully closing a sale? Exactly, right? Yeah. So what are you going to do? How are you going to create— you have no idea where to begin. There's 5 million things and you may not know which one is your problem, right? So create some very specific objectives that are tied to behaviors, because that's actually going to lead into all the next 3. You can't, You can't evaluate it. You can't focus on the experience. You can't— you have to know what you're trying to fix. Okay.

So for, for the sake of our audience, right, we're in fleet and let's say we're doing an annual, monthly, quarterly safety training when it comes to shop safety, right? What you've got to do for OSHA, for example, right? So you're going through that. You need to actually set up what that outline or what that baseline ends up being that you want to accomplish through that training. Right? So if I want everyone to understand, for example, where my wash stations are and how to properly use them, or if I want everyone to understand where the emergency exits are, if I want them to understand, you know, where they have to walk, those are the objectives you actually have to set apart before you do the training. And do you actually state those prior to the training so everyone has a firm understanding of what you're going to cover and what they need to understand walking out?

Yeah, I mean, I think that you can absolutely set an agenda. I'm— who you talk to in the training world is like, do you, do you share your agenda? You're going to get any varying degree of agreement or disagreement there. Some people say, "No, it's pointless." Other people say, "Oh yeah, you want to— it establishes the credibility of why they're there," right? What's in it for me? For me, I think it's important to do two things. I think it's important to, yes, share that agenda because they need to understand what they're going to walk away with. But 2, you know, when we talk about creating effective training and getting people engaged, you got to hook them in with a story and talk to them about— get some emotions going, whether it's a success or, you know, a bad thing that happened. So it's not just going to be about, "Where are my stations and how do I use them?" But what happens if I don't? What happens if I don't know? How does it impact me? Perfect. What's, what's the next step? Your baseline. So your baseline goes a little bit deeper than your agenda. So establishing your baseline is when we're talking about, "Hey, I need to address a critical behavior. I need to understand where my gaps are with that behavior," right? So if I— when we talk about the very last, one of the very last steps, which is evaluating training success, I can't do that if I didn't know where I started. So if I'm trying to attack certain behavior, whether it be safety, sales, implementation, take your pick, I have to know where my gaps are. Where am I not performing? What, what exactly am I trying to improve? And then we'll talk in a little bit about now, how do I make sure that my training was successful in evaluating that particular measurement? Yeah.

Now, I would hope that everyone would know what their baseline is, right? You would hope that people understand where their deficiencies are within their shop, within their fleet, or what's going on. If people don't, I guess, have a clear understanding of baseline, how do they get that baseline? So I think that depends.

You have what we have, you have qualitative and quantitative metrics that you can go with, right? I think we all know the difference. Quantitative is going to be, I have a number I can tie to that. So it could be some type of safety scoring. It could be, you know, I've seen trucking companies, you know, they're dealing with CSA, FMCSA data, right? And so they're very aware of what their scores are, and if they're not, You need somebody managing your fleet differently. There's issues. Hello, that's sketchy if you can't tell me what that is. So, and you know very specifically in what area you need to improve. So, you know, if I do training focused on those behaviors, then I should see marked improvement with my inspection data, right? But then there's, what about when you don't have quantitative? What if you're not tying it to a metric? What if it's qualitative? Well, that's where, that's where evaluating comes in also and why training isn't the sole solution. So if it's more something where you don't have a case API, or you don't have a specific number tied to it, it's, it's, it's gonna take follow-up coaching, right? That's why training isn't the sole solution. I can stand up here and I can create an engaging environment and I can give you the information that you need. We can have a great time and laugh our way through it and cry our way through it, whatever it is. But when you leave my training room and you go back to hopefully execute on what we talked about, It's not me that has to follow up with you, right? It's going to be your manager, it's going to be your supervisor, it's going to be your teammates. It's whoever, whoever you're accountable to and accountable for is going to have to do some observations and make sure you check in the boxes.

Yep. OK, so from establishing a baseline, right, we go to step number 4, which is the learning experience. It's a good one.

This is the big one, right? This is like, But you can't get here if you don't have the other ones. That's, that's the problem, right? So to get to this one, this is where a lot of people make the wrong assumption, right? We focus on, we focus solely on content, right? Okay, I'm gonna have these people for an hour. I'm gonna cram all this stuff. I got to get as much in because this is gonna be the only time I can talk to these people. And so what we end up doing is we end up talking for an hour and we end up talking about who knows how many different topics and going down rabbit holes. And 5 minutes in, you've lost half your audience. They're gone. They're like, "I don't— whatever. What's on TikTok?" You know, that's it. They're done. So you have to, you have to focus on the learner experience. And we spend a lot of time focusing— it's not about you as a trainer, right? And we focus— look at all these great things I can say. Look at all these great things I can do. Look at all these great things that I know. It's not about you. It's about them. And so there's a— it's called CCAF, which is— it's an acronym, and it talks about context, challenge, activity, and feedback. You need those 4 components. You'll see that a lot if you start researching e-learning, but it really is applicable across the board. So, and what we mean by that is what is the context of your training? We talked about that, right? What are my key objectives? What's my baseline? What's my context? The second thing is challenge. People need to be presented with a challenge to stay engaged. You have to engage every aspect of the brain. OK, otherwise they're, they're on their phones. It doesn't matter, right? So give— people love a challenge. Give me a challenge I can solve. I know, I know certain things. I have experience. Let me show you that I have that experience. Let me show you that I have that knowledge, right? And then the activity is I need to take that challenge and put you in the midst of some type of activity. Right, whether that's individual, whether that's gamification, whether that's in a group, whether it's moving around, whatever it is, I need to have some kind of activity where I can apply that challenge, and then I need feedback. During that learning session, you should be providing feedback to, to your learners in the experience. So they're going to tell you these great things that they came up with in the learning, and you're going to provide them evaluative feedback where we talk about, okay, I understand why you did that. There's a problem with that because now, you know, you just got dinged on, you know, on your inspection, or you just, you know, your engine just blew up because that was the wrong one to do, right? And so, and then through the feedback, then they go back and you create another experience for them to now apply it again. So it's a total full circle. But the activity and the challenges is two of the most important aspects of that.

Yeah, I think you're going to find most people, they struggle, right? We talk about number 4 being the most important— focus on the learning experience. But that is also where most people fail because someone goes in and they get, they get just mind-numb because you're basically doing a data throw-up all at them without any engagement whatsoever. Right. And we see it all the time. So in trucking, for example, we would do driver orientation. At different companies, right? Someone would get in there and they talk. They're not relating with stories. They're not talking to the drivers by name. Hey, Steve, have you had an experience about this? Hey, John, what do you think about this? Right? They're not bringing that in or they're not, you know, asking them how they had an experience that may have gone south or that may have gone right with this. Right. It's just a straight talk. In addition, right. One of the other things they would do is like, oh, we've got these great videos that we want to show you, right? Because it has all the information that you need. They say it a lot better than I ever could. You know, these are professionals. So you pop on a video and you expect people to sit there and watch that video for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour, whatever it ends up being, and stay engaged with that video. And there's no interaction back and forth. We had a— God, when I, when I took over Fleetwood back in 2014, I walked into the driver orientation like the— I'd probably been there for 2 or 3 months and I hadn't gone to driver orientation. I walked in and we had a day where we did nothing but play videos. Can you imagine how much they didn't learn during that full day process? I walked in and every single one of them sitting there on their phone playing games, doing whatever, not paying attention. And we expected them to walk out of there understanding what we were trying to teach them.

Not only can I imagine it, I've, I've lived that, and I've also been that type of facilitator. And nothing, nothing will bring it to the forefront more than getting raked across the coals by the people you thought you were helping, telling you, like, "You totally suck." You know what I mean? Like, "This was awful. This was like the worst experience ever. Please don't, please don't ever do that again." So, and I think a lot of people, I think anybody listening has probably had at least one experience like that, whether they've been lectured to for hours on end or they've been sat in a room and said, "Here, watch these videos and now you're good to go." It's like, yeah, okay, whatever. So I totally, I totally feel that. And you know, one of the things that I also, whether it's a video or whether it's a human being standing in front of you, one thing that I really live by when it comes to facilitating a course is telling isn't teaching. Telling is talking. Telling isn't teaching. You know, and nobody wants to sit and listen to you talk about a perfect world or a textbook situation. They want— and especially when you're dealing with adults, when we talk about adult learners, you'd be surprised at how closely adult learners resemble child learners, because I've worked in education as well, and I've worked with elementary and middle school kids. And then when I transitioned, then I went into adult learning, I went, wow, it's very similar. But I'm serious, it really is. It's very similar. But like adults want to participate. They want to talk. And I always tell, I always tell my facilitators when I was managing a training team is, you should, you should be the person talking the least. And if you truly facilitate, if you create an experience where you're leveraging them, and you said it really good, Jeff, I like how you, when you said, asking them about their experience, asking them to fill in the holes. Like, I'm going to propose an open-ended question and the class is going to tell me. You know, the answers. And then I'm going to leverage everybody out. I'm not going to tell them if they're right or wrong. I'm going to pose that question back to the learners. I'm gonna say, "Hey, what did you guys think about Jeff's response? Would you do that the same?" They start learning from each other faster than they'll ever learn from you, because they know they're all in the same boat, and they all get really excited to talk about themselves. So it's not about you as a facilitator. It's our favorite subject, right?

Ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, honestly, we tell stories about ourselves and people learn from stories, right? And what you said is so, so true because if I'm asking the audience, like, let's say we're having a training on distracted driving and I say, Kim, do you have an experience about distracted driving and where you may have done something that you shouldn't have because you were distracted or, you know, something was prevented because you weren't distracted? You're going to have a story whether you drive a truck or not, just in your personal vehicle, you can tell me. About the time you were answering a text message and you had to slam on your brakes and barely miss rear-ending the car in front of you.

Or I actually hit the car in front of me.

But let's not talk about that. I was giving you grace. But yeah, we'll go all the way.

Don't give me any grace. Just call me out on it. It's fine.

Right. But then as the instructor and I asked someone else, I said, okay, Tim, is there something that you think that or experience you had that was similar or, you know, something that you can share on that? Then Tim gets in there and he starts talking about it. And then Steve over here starts talking about his experience. And you're right, now we're listening and we're engaged because it isn't just Jeff's voice that's up front the whole time, right? The same tone, there's excitement. And the other thing is we learn so much better with stories and being able to relate to something than anything else.

And what's really cool about that is then as a facilitator, as a trainer, you can take that and then turn it not only from a discussion but into a direct learning activity, right? So you could have somebody— I use a whiteboard. You could be using whiteboard on Zoom. And this is where a lot of people like, "Oh, it's virtual. I can't do these things." Yes, you can. You can be just as interactive virtually as you can in person. But you can have, you know, hey, I— as we're talking about this, you're jotting, or even better, you're having somebody else or multiple people standing up and they're jotting down all these different ideas. And then you're wanting to translate that, right? We're gonna, we're gonna stick with your example, Jeff, of distracted driving, OK? So whether whether you're a big fleet or you're a small fleet, doesn't matter, distracted driving, right? And then you have all of these different boards now or something like that. And you're going to put people into pairs, you're going to put them into groups, and you're going to now put them in front of them and be like, OK, now I want— let's take this now into a regulatory space. All right. Or let's take it into a company space, however you're evaluating that for your drivers or your team, right? What are the critical components? So I want you to think about all of these and let's, let's think, you know, what are the regulatory requirements? And you're gonna see how much they know. And then from that, they're gonna team present, they're gonna do what we call a teach-back, okay? They're gonna team present some of their ideas and as a group again, you're gonna discuss and through that discussion, you've now covered all your topics, you've covered your base, they know exactly. What the requirements are, why it's a bad idea, or why it's a good idea. And you did almost nothing. They did it.

Because they did it together. You're given the topic and you're letting them teach outside of that.

Yeah, you're letting them collaborate and teach, and that's where the feedback piece is, right? Because if somebody's ultimately wrong, or they're taking us in a direction, or, you know, something like that, you definitely don't want to let it go. You're not gonna be like, "Oh yeah, that's great." Fantastic, keep going. No, you're gonna put the kibosh on it. But a lot of times too, I stay out of hot water with my trainees because I don't tell them they're wrong. I'll turn it back to the class, be like, all right, I see where you're going with that. What does everybody else think? And everybody else will call each other out. They're not afraid to be like, no, no, no, no, no, that's crazy ridiculous. And then we have some discussion about it. So you can take all of these items and make it one big activity where people are doing a Think Share, people doing a teach-back. You can do, you can play games with it. We've done, I know it sounds silly because we're all adults here, but I'm telling you, they have more fun doing things like this. We put them like they're on the panel of The View and we interview them. We have people interview them and we ask them questions like, "Oh my gosh, how would you do this?" We throw out interview questions like they're superstars and they give a whole interview. On whatever the topic is. And they're essentially— these people are teaching it. So there's any number of games and activities that you can do that keep people engaged, keep them thinking. But make sure that your challenges and your scenarios are real life. Don't give them textbook stuff. That, that doesn't help anybody. Give them real-life situations that they're solving.

So from your experience, when you have those people that, like you talked about, the view panel, right, and they're the ones teaching, do you give them a heads-up or you just call them at the training I've done both.

And so it does work nicely if you, you know, "Hey, give us 3 minutes." You pull them aside, you give them a heads-up of what, what's coming. But it's not about the question. It's not about knowing the questions ahead of time. That's the trick, right? It's like, and if they don't know, then you poll the audience, right? You do that. I have them do— some people don't like to be surprised. So I think you have to take that into context too. Right? It really, you have to, you have to know, you know, your people if you can. But I've done things like that with, you know, walking into a room full of people that don't know me from a speck of dirt on the wall, and we just do it. And some of them are like, "OK, you know, this is a little weird." But it's because they're not used to doing, they're used to teaching is, you know, telling is teaching. They thought they would get to sit on their phone for an hour or whatever, or doodle. I had people do that, and that's— you don't get to do that in my training. So you can also create randomizers, so you call people out randomly, and it's never you picking on somebody. You just be like, "All right, Jeff, this question's for you," and you don't know what's coming. "OK, Tim, it's your turn. This question is for you," you know, so you can do that as well.

OK, so learning experience, number one thing, make sure that they have a good experience. And what's the, what's the final of the 5 critical components?

Well, you have to evaluate training success. Just because you've created training and even if they had a great time doesn't mean that your training is successful. And so you need to be able to evaluate if you're accomplishing the goal, right? So we're going back again, what was our learning objective? What was the baseline? And then I'm going to evaluate these individuals, whether it's a metric or through observation or both is a nice preference if you have both. And did we, did we elevate? Because if we didn't elevate, then they didn't learn anything. And it would be highly unlikely if absolutely everyone in the class didn't, you know, like, if you just say, oh, well, you know, my course was effective, they just didn't apply it. Really? Nobody in your course applied anything? No, that's just you being— having an ego, right? I've had some serious bombs. I've created trainings that were Totally ineffective, right? And, and it, and it, and it totally hurts because you're like, wow, I put, I put so much time in it, but I didn't, I didn't put time in the right place. And it happens. It happens even to pros.

So, so are you an advocate of like a more LMS type system to where you're asking questions at the end of a training, right? To make sure that the engagement was there the whole time or no?

Wow. You're gonna make me, you're gonna make me talk about it. Okay. So for anybody listening who is like a huge fan of multiple choice knowledge checks, I'm gonna disagree with you right now. And here's why. I do think that they can be quasi-effective. I think if you have just a couple quick, you know, 2 or 3 questions, I guess it's all right, but I wouldn't use that completely or solely as my evaluation. And the reason being is when we think about multiple choice questions, They're usually very black and white. You're giving them the answer and they just have to choose the best of what they think. And most people are fairly intelligent. They can pretty much figure out which one is the right one. And sometimes, yeah, and sometimes we overcomplicate them too, trying to trick people like, oh, we don't want to give it away. And I found that even just recently, you know, creating some knowledge checks. I'm like, well, this is— why am I doing this? Like, this is way too easy. So I think there's like, if you're creating some type of certification test, okay, I can buy that, but I think they need to be more discussionary. You can ask a question, but, but I'm more of a fan of let's have an open conversation. And if you're doing something virtually, you can ask a couple questions just to see if they were paying attention, but I don't feel it's as effective as other ways. So I'm going to have to— I'm going to put a kibosh on it a little bit and say, I wouldn't rest on that. Hey, kibosh away.

I think that if you're having a discussion and everyone is involved, right, and participating, you're 100% right. It's not needed. I think when you get into bigger groups where you can't have total participation amongst everybody there, maybe at that point in time, it'd be something that you want to go ahead and do. But yeah, I actually can go either way. All right. So you talked about, yeah, you talked about like a panel, right? You talked about a little bit of gamification. You talked about group discussions. So what other type of activities can you add into a training to help it be a more effective session for the people that are attending?

Yeah, absolutely. So when we, you mentioned, or I mentioned technically group activities, you can also do something called a think-pair-share. That's, that's a common one and usually very effective. So you give whatever the challenge is or the situation is, you give that to the individuals, right? And they all kind of work on it. You give them a time limit. They all kind of work on maybe how they would respond, what they would do, what they think of this situation, whatever that is. And then they're going to pair up. So not a big group, just 2 people together. And they're going to compare and contrast, like, hey, what did you think? What did you come up with? Oh, I like that. I didn't like, like that. And then at the end of that is the share component where You know, one person of the group, of the two, the duo, I guess, kind of shares what they came up with. And again, timed. Timing is key, right? It's like 2 minutes, 2 minutes, 3 minutes. We're not talking like hours. These should be really quick hits. And it allows you to, through that conversation, to do just like we talked about, maybe if you had everybody at a board and they were all talking about it, kind of the same principle, where as the facilitator, then you're guiding the discussion, you're asking more in-depth questions, you're challenging Right? What they're saying, OK, I understand that, but I'm going to challenge you. Let's think a little bit deeper. If they're too vague, you go, that's way too vague. Get more specific. So there's things like that. You can, if you have the opportunity to play games, well, you mentioned gamification. There's a lot of things out there that you can, I know it sounds silly, but you can do race cars, and people love to compete. Of course. Yeah, Jeff knows that. People love to compete and be the winner, you know, so you can, you can, you can create some nice camaraderie that way. You can do flashcard activities. You can do— you can have people draw random questions, open-ended questions. Never do closed-ended questions. You can have them do open-ended questions and answer them. You can have them do round robins, teach-backs. There's— if you look, there's so many. Just Google it. Google active learning strategies. And you will find a plethora of items that you can use. Yeah.

One of the things, and we didn't really talk about it specifically, but we attend this thing called SaaS Academy. Josh and I have to learn more about just how to, you know, effectively run a SaaS business through all different facets of it. But one of the things that they do really well is the engagement, right? And they actually have you stand up and this is an all-day thing. And I'm not saying people's trainings are, but even if it's an hour, they have you stand up you know, probably every 20 minutes or so, just to make sure you're not getting comfortable and relaxed, just to make sure your blood's flowing. Because the worst thing is sitting down for a long period of time, because then you start to get tired, right? And your eyes get heavy, and you're distracted, and your mind goes other places. So there's nothing wrong with stopping training, especially when you notice that that's happening, and saying, okay, everybody, let's stand up real fast, let's take a— let's take a minute, let's just like shake out our bodies. They did this whole yoga thing, which I actually thought was kind of cheesy, right? But it got, it got, it got everybody standing up and it got everybody's blood flowing. And, you know, you can actually tell the engagement gets better right after that happens.

Yeah. Yeah. You have to— I mean, I think the timings have changed, you know, as we think generationally as well. You know, instant gratification. But, you know, it used to be— I don't know what the current numbers are, but it used to be you'd have to re-engage people's brains at least once every 8 to 10 minutes, because people just kind of falter off. And so I'm a big— I don't believe in, you know, we're going to go for 2 hours, we're going to take an extended 15-minute break, and, you know, whatever that is. I like to take, you know, you know, a couple 5-minute stretch breaks, right? Even whether we're staying in the classroom, everybody, hey, just get up and go grab a snack and come back. You got 5 minutes. We— I did, I used to do an activity where we, I'd have everybody stand up and it would be kind of, okay, if, you know, this or that, right? So do you like chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream, left or right, right? But then one of the every other question would be something a little more specific to the material that we were talking about, you know. So are you pro this or pro that? And we'd have discussion. And so that's another way to get people up and moving and not doing yoga. But I would have loved to see you do yoga. I think that'd be hilarious.

That'd be awesome. It actually was hilarious, though, just some of the different moves.

That's really good. Downward dog, go.

No, you don't want to see that, I promise. OK, so the final thing I want to bring up real quick is, so there's challenges, right, when it comes to virtual learning. There are some challenges with on-site, but I think more virtual. So kind of walk us through nowadays when we have so many people still working virtual or hybrid, What are like effective ways of keeping those peoples engaged? Because outside of making sure everybody keeps their camera on, right? And, you know, you set the rules of engagement for the meeting. You don't want to get Tobin'd on anybody. But just, you know, what can you do to make sure that that stays as good as it could if we're all in person together?

Yeah, no, that's an excellent question. And I think that one of the biggest challenges there is, as a facilitator, reprogram yourself. In terms of, you know, at the end of the day, you cannot control somebody's engagement, right? Just like we say, you can't motivate people. You can create a motivating environment, but you can't motivate somebody. So I can create an engaging environment, but ultimately, I can't make them participate, right? But there are some things virtually that you can do. And I think that if people are attending a training, they, they do want to get something out of it. And typically, they're going to fade away if they don't feel like they are, they don't feel like they're relevant, if they don't feel like they're valued, right? So some things that you can do other than the camera, because depending on who you're training, you may not be able to force them to turn on a camera, but you can create— so if you're using Zoom, right, I like to use whiteboards because it allows them to draw on them, they can type on them, You can, you can create games on them, or they can do matching games. Use breakout rooms if you have that ability, so you can still do group work, and you can have them broken out, and they can do the think-pair-share. They can do the group activity. They can do group activity on their own whiteboard, right, just like if you had the, you know, the flip charts or, or whatever it is. The randomizer is great for virtual people because And you tell them upfront, like, "Everybody's in here. As we're going through, I want you, you know, I want you to engage." And you're just going to call them out random. And nobody wants to be that person. Nobody wants to be the person who's like, "Oh, I'm sorry, what?" You know, "Was it— oh, you're not here. Oh, dang." So those things are there. You can still have conversation together. I know a lot of people like to chat, right? I find in my virtual trainings that I've even been leading here, you know, a lot of people are very reluctant to to unmute themselves and voice it, but they'll go and chat all day long. And so be OK with a little— be comfortable with a little bit of silence. Let people start chatting and, you know, have discussion that way. And so all of the things that you do in the class physically in a classroom or training room, conference room, whatever, you can do virtually. You just have to apply it a little bit differently.

OK. Perfect. Well, Kim, it's been a good session. So leave us some parting thoughts just on the engaging training— engaging trainings. Yeah.

Put the learner's experience above your content, right? Wow. If you want people to enjoy, then you need to create the 3 Ms. And so what does that mean? That means training has to be memorable, right? It has to be motivational, and it has to be meaningful. So make sure that it's focused on core behaviors, that their experience is the most important thing to you, not how much content you can spew in an hour, and make sure that you get them involved, and that's the key thing. You could do— even, even if you had no idea what your key objective is, make sure they get involved. Make sure that they're talking and they're sharing their experience.

That's great, because I know a lot of places I've been where we've had company trainings, it's usually that thing that you see on your calendar and you do what? Ugh. Right? One of two reactions. Ugh, gosh, I'm going to waste time. I'm not going to get any work done. Or hell yeah, I don't have to do any work.

I don't have to do any work. Woo-hoo! I get to sleep. I get to take a nap. I get to— yeah, no. Yeah, exactly.

But if you, if you follow the 3 Ms, people are more likely to look forward to trainings and want to go and do them because they are memorable, right? You're actually having a good time. You're not just sitting there as another waste of time taking you away from other things that may be important.

That's exactly right. Exactly. Fantastic.

All right, well, Kim, we appreciate you joining. Thank you very much for, for taking, you know, about 40 minutes out of your day to come in and help our audience learn more about engaging trainings. Do not forget, we have this Fleet Success Playbook version 2. Actually, we are in the process of approving that. It'll be out here hopefully in the next month or two. If you'd like a copy, email us at podcast@rtafleet.com. podcast@rtafleet.com. Also, if you have any questions, you have any themes, you have anything you want us to discuss on the podcast, you can shoot it to us there. Additionally, do not forget March 21st and 22nd of this year. Yay! We can finally say this year. We are going to have the Fleet Success Summit in Las Vegas at the Luxor. Guys, I'm telling you, go get your tickets. This summit is the best leadership summit you are ever going to attend when it comes to fleet and fleet focus. We have powerful heavy hitters that are showing up. It is going to be the event that is going to help you change the directory the trajectory of your fleet in 2023. That's why we put it in March. We want you to be able to use those things you learn and utilize them for the rest of the year. If you want more information, fleetsuccesssummit.com. You could also email us podcast@rtafleet.com. We'd be happy to give you some information. From myself, our producer Tim, and Kim, our guest, we appreciate you listening. And until next time, take it easy, guys.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you like the show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us on social media at Fleet Success. See you next time.