Post-Training Questionnaires -- What Are They Good For?

Tom Goddard — Thu, 15 May 2008 11:10:07 -0400

Most organizations (91%) evaluate their training programs with satisfaction surveys. Far fewer evaluate what trainees learned (54%) or how well their training transferred to their work (23%). Does this make sense? Are we training employees so that they can be satisfied, or so that they can learn how to do their jobs better?

One answer is that it is too hard or too expensive to assess how much people learned in the training. The argument then goes, “if they’re satisfied with the training, perhaps that means they learned something, and therefore we’ll be able to use satisfaction as a substitute for learning.”

But is that true? Sitzmann and her colleagues set out to find out the answers not only to these questions, but to other questions, like what characteristics of the trainee or the course will predict how the trainee rates the course?

Post-training satisfaction surveys are good for telling you about how motivated employees are likely to be as a result of the training, but not about how much they learned. Organizations are much better off asking a trainee whether he/she feels confident about their ability to use what they learned in a training than how much the liked the training. Of course, if you really want to measure how effective at teaching the trainees your training is, measure their learning, not their satisfaction with the course.

Telecommuting: "It's Mainly a Good Thing"

Tom Goddard — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:01:57 -0500

In a meta-analysis of 46 studies of telecommuting, involving over 12,000 employees, Gajedran and Harrison of Pennsylvania State University concluded that existing research generally supports the well-publicized claims that telecommuting is good for employers and employees alike. However, “telecommuting intensity”, or the extent of scheduled time that employees spend doing tasks away from a central work location, can play a role in the impact of telecommuting.