Impact Assurance
How to tell whether training actually stuck
Smile sheets measure enjoyment, not change. What to measure instead if you want evidence that behaviour moved.
Ask most organisations how their last communication training went and you will get a satisfaction score. People enjoyed it. They would recommend it. Almost none of this tells you whether anything changed.
Measure behaviour, not sentiment
The useful questions are behavioural and specific. Are client meetings ending with a clear next step more often than they did? Are proposals getting fewer rounds of revision? Is the sales team's talk-to-listen ratio moving?
These are observable. They are also uncomfortable, because they can show that nothing happened — which is precisely why they are worth measuring.
The month after matters more than the day itself
Behaviour change has a half-life. Without reinforcement, most of what happens in a workshop decays within weeks. This is why our programs attach a monitoring window after the session rather than ending at the closing slide.
The goal is not to prove the training was good. It is to catch the participants who are drifting back, early enough to do something about it.
