You don’t need to evaluate everything you do
Written by Stuart Haden on November 17, 2015
When I run a workshop it’s standard procedure to hand out evaluation forms at the end of the session. Trouble is standard procedures aren’t always a valuable investment of our time. Very often we just roll them out because that’s what we have always done. Blindly following what has gone on before, a procession lining up out of habit.
If you run a restaurant would you issue feedback cards to every diner? Did anybody evaluate your contribution to the meeting you attended yesterday? Remember ‘you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it.’
But what’s the alternative? Easy – you can assess how much progress the participants have made. This time you are placing your measurement activities in the the right place. Measuring the facilitators ability to build rapport, quality of resources etc is a bigger waste of time because you are measuring the wrong thing! Very simply at the start of a workshop I issue a self assessment form (based on the content, e.g. coaching capability) and again at the end, which will show a % improvement. Typically if the session is only a day long I do not evaluate it, but any session 2+ days is fair game.
