How do you balance the needs and expectations of multiple stakeholders in your training design?

One method I consistently find useful is to walk through the process you are training for, whether it is entering and identifying patient info, or utilizing a legal case management system for info and filings. This allows you to quickly identify stakeholders outside of your own team. This also allows you to streamline meetings or process implementation later, by identifying the limitations of the stakeholders' authority/input.

To me, my biggest stakeholder is my learner. So, every step I take, every word I put into my prototype has to align with the needs of my learner. Of course, the subject matter experts will have plethora of information that they would want me to add in the training. But ideally, I need to take a call if that has to be added into one training or can be broken down into two keeping in mind the comfort of my learner. When all the decisions revolve around the major stakeholder, things align themselves and there is less fuss.

In my opinion the needs analysis is the most critical part of reaching stakeholders. Note stakeholders include both leaders and non-leader learners. Some good questions to ask stakeholders: What do you like/dislike about our current training? What would you like to see more/less of? What are some areas of training we are missing? How can I help better engage learners?

A live document with share access to all the key stakeholders helps be on the same page. Once all the inputs are collected, the document is to be approved and locked. This reduces the back and forth time between emailing and getting on calls and spending a truckload of time in organizing everyone's take on one consolidated document.

While communication needs to be ongoing and detailed, it also has to be meaningful. That means that, as stakeholders ability to impact the process, they should be allowed to be released to their other responsibilities, so as to avoid the dreaded "reply all" time sinkhole. Communication also needs to be applicable; e.g., after the committee phase, communication should be updates, not input, and feedback, not debate.

Only a small percentage of training in the business world is done well. The situation isn't hard to fix, but most stakeholders don't know how to fix it, or they probably would. Try to understand what a consultant recently told me about the worldwide publishing company where she worked. She said the instructional designers don't do much instructional design; they're really graphics technologists. She's right. Hiring managers hire people who know eLearning software, which is packed with irrelevant, shiny features that distract designers and stakeholders. Expert instructors master simple design and high-quality content, while tying everything to a clear business objective. So, help stakeholders keep it simple. Trainees will thank you.

Make sure you have a continuous feedback loop with your learners. Some great ways to gather feedback: Surveys, ideally in the same system as the learning. Ratings of courses, ideally with multiple criteria. Group feedback sessions. Randomly assigned needs analyses. Targeted needs analyses based on data (focus on the top and bottom engagement quartiles)

Acknowledgement is most effective when it is specific and implies that good performance is normal. For example, "Rhonda saved the day yesterday by noticing an inconsistency in our report. Before the CFO was able to read it, Rhonda fixed cell AA23 by replacing the old total with the accurate total we were so proud to report. The CFO called me immediately to tell me he was dancing with joy!" We could cause all sorts of trouble by overdoing that, such as: "Rhonda was amazing yesterday! She fixed a reporting error that should never have been made. I wish everyone on our team was so conscientious and alert. Rhonda, stop by my office and get your well-deserved gift card." As a rule, celebrate teamwork and acknowledge individual contributions.