How can you launch internal employee training programs within Microsoft Teams that have a high level of engagement from start to finish?
When you’re able to tackle three key things well, we guarantee employee engagement during training sessions will increase significantly:
In this playbook, we’ll walk you through how to tackle all three with Polly and Microsoft Teams
Whether you’re putting managers through leadership training or launching personal development programs for employees, it’s important to have a dedicated and centralized place for trainees to refer back to throughout the program.
If you’re an organization that uses Microsoft Teams, launching training programs as a Teams in-meeting chat ensures that you’re able to:
By having a dedicated place for training programs and related comms, organization becomes easier for moderators.
Start every training session with a fresh and unique team building activity. With Polly for MS Teams, you’ll be able to pick from a range of hybrid team building activities, including:
When you’re able to engage your audience within the first 5 minutes and get them participating, you’ll set everyone up for a great training session ahead!
Check out how to set up your Polly’s before every training session to ensure you’re prepared for a great session every time.
It’s no secret that hybrid meetings can be tricky and difficult for remote workers. In hybrid environments, it can be easy for a group of people participating in-office to tune out those joining virtually.
That’s why it’s so important for training facilitators to be extra intentional when it comes to running hybrid programs. But, lucky for us, there are some easy-to-implement strategies that can help us facilitate more inclusive environments for our audience, in-person and remote.
Let’s walk through a few:
Instead of having onsite employees join together in one big meeting room, have everyone join the training session virtually. That ensures that you only have to optimize for one experience: virtual training.
Of course, you need to have an office that can facilitate having multiple people virtually joining into these sessions at the same time. So, if you’re not equipped with a lot of meeting rooms (or they’re always booked up) or telephone booths, it may be hard to implement this.
Depending on the size of your training group, it can be a big ask to not only present the training program content, but to moderate the session too. Having a facilitator can help create a more inclusive environment because you’ll have a dedicated person whose role is to actively:
By adding Owners to your Polly, you’re giving another person on your team to see and manage Polly just like you can. This is the easiest way to introduce a co-facilitator to your training program.
Owners can be added at any time, regardless of if a Polly is open or closed. To do this, just follow these step-by-step instructions:
It can feel less intimidating for a participant to put their hand up when they’re in the same room (or alternatively if they’re remote). Giving trainees the ability to participate in a variety of ways ensures that everyone has a different avenue to share feedback and make their voice heard throughout the training program.
With Polly, you can introduce a wide range of opportunities for trainees to participate, including:
Kicking off every training session with a team building activity: Get people in the habit of participating at the start of every session.
Sending timely surveys and polls in-between and during sessions: Whether you’re looking to gather feedback throughout the training program or checking in on progress, use Polly to schedule and send timely surveys and polls to keep the lines of communication open.
Launching in-session quizzes: If you really want to double-down on learning, you can launch quizzes during your training session. Within MS Teams, you can prepare your quizzes beforehand and launch them altogether or sporadically throughout your session. Plus, you’ll be able to display a leaderboard for all trainees to see. Who doesn’t love a good competition?
When it comes to quizzes, Polly customers have even shared that they’re a great way to gauge if people—especially those tuning in virtually—are engaged throughout the session. Because, it’s one thing to be on the call, it’s another to be listening.
Plus you can export all of that data and feed it right into your LMS system if you’d like!
The best way to continuously improve your training program? Timely feedback.
With Polly, you’ll be able to schedule a wide range of surveys and polls to gather valuable feedback from trainees.
Some Pollys you can embed into your training program include:
Not sure how to structure your Pollys? You can access pre-made templates in Teams
Adding a Microsoft Form into your lesson documents isn’t enough. Not only is it an additional step trainees have to take—meaning they’re less likely to engage—but it might not get seen altogether.
Instead, make it easy and frictionless for your audience to participate in Q&As, polls, and surveys directly from their training program chat.
💡 The key to success at this stage? Sending post-event surveys through DMs—directly to every attendee. Sending surveys via DMs has proven to increase survey response rates by 3.5X versus channels.
Aggregate and learn from all of the feedback surveys and polls throughout your training program.
With a continuous stream of feedback across every stage of the training program, you’ll be able to uncover key areas to improve and implement for the next cohort. Analyze and compare: