Imagine if you had a network of women leaders all across the country that you could tap anytime you wanted to find out what’s working for them. With our new feature, Worked for Her, you can. In our most recent installment, Penny Powers, Director of HR at NDC Real Estate Management in Pittsburgh, shares her secret to spicing up her company’s meetings. 

When it comes to rolling out a new process, software or program, we want our staffers to be well-equipped and confident after training.

But as we all know, training sessions can quickly turn into a big snooze-fest.

It’s hard to keep everyone engaged when you’re talking through instructions and tedious process steps.

And the more long-term downside to boring training sessions is that staffers don’t retain the information. So when it comes time to use the new process or program, they don’t remember everything that was taught.

For the sake of our staffers and our company’s efficiency, we needed to shake up our training sessions.

Creating experts

How did we do that? By replacing our usual lectures with interactive, trivia-style training.

Before a session, we email everyone a short document with new material to review beforehand.

Then we break staffers into groups and randomly call on them to answer questions about the material.

If someone gets the answer wrong, they’re out of the game – but their group continues. The team with the most members left at the end wins. (And the more important the topic is, the bigger the prize is.)

Now during training, there’s a lot less snoozing and a lot more laughter and learning.

(Penny Powers, Director of HR, NDC Real Estate Management, Pittsburgh)

Looking for more proven strategies from your peers? Check out our new offering 101 Management Problems Solved: How Successful Women Tackled Common Leadership Challenges