Strong Rapport is Key to Great Instructional Design

The core of my instructional design philosophy could boil down to this: you have to create trust with the demographic you are serving. If you don’t, they will never tell you what they need. A good needs assessment identifies gaps, problems, and things that are not working. Talking about any of that in a work setting is a risk. People are making themselves vulnerable when they share this information. So Step 1 to any good needs assessment is create trust.

I was hired to re-vamp onboarding for an operations department. All workers were remote. I could have come in and scheduled meetings with all the supervisors (there were seven) and told them that I knew the best practices for instructional design, and here were my templates, and this is what we were going to do. I’ve got the templates. I’ve got the experience. I’ve got the expertise. I know this stuff works. I also know that the 200 people working in this operations department deserve better than “trust me, this works.”

So every interview I do has four steps. Step One is where do you live, what’s good to eat there, and do you like plants or pets. If they volunteer that they have kids, we talk about the kids. This is all stuff I love, and it’s easy to be enthusiastic about it. I share that I live in Austin, TX, where there’s great queso, and I’ve been working to keep some succulents alive with middling success.

Step Two is who am I and how do I know what I know. Master’s degree. Research fellowship. 8 years of experience. This starts to create credibility, but I still haven’t explained how I can help this specific team with its specific pain points.

Step Three is: how do you measure a great onboarding program? This question gets people to reveal the pain points in a positive way.

“I measure a great onboarding program by how fast we can get someone up and running” = “our current onboarding needs to be more efficient.”

“I measure a great training program by how often people refer back to their onboarding materials” = “the onboarding materials need to match what people actually do on the job, and may be out of date.”

“I measure a great onboarding program by whether the people actually like the onboarding program” = “the current onboarding program needs to include rapport-building, easily identifiable objectives, and opportunities for feedback.”

Step Four is “Here is how I can do that for you.” Each pain point is paired with an instructional design best practice.

Onboarding needs to be more efficient? Let’s define objectives, reverse design the curriculum so the learner gets consistent contact with those objectives, and ensure the contact they get with those objectives involves low-stakes opportunities to practice the skill.

Onboarding materials don’t relate to the job? Tell me who’s great at what. I’ll get them to do demonstrations for me, and I’ll turn the demonstrations into training exercises and reference materials that even current employees can be up-trained on.

Want people to like the onboarding? Give them a clear idea of what doing well looks like. Here is a map of your onboarding, here are the objectives, here are the exercises where you will know if you are meeting them.

I found in every interview, the same trends kept coming up. People kept finishing the sentence “I measure a great onboarding program by” with the same things. This allowed me to go to the leadership team that hired me and say, “This percentage of people report that we need _____. Here are the strategies I will implement that are specifically targeted to fix ____.”

Here’s the wild thing: every onboarding program needs those best practices. I knew that before my first day. But how much more powerful is it to say, “this is the problem as identified by the people doing the job and the managers managing them, and here is my solution that is grounded in best practices” vs “I’m the expert, do what I say.”

Those conversations meant that when I asked for volunteers to demonstrate parts of their job, people wanted to work with me. When I wanted to train trainers in best practices, everybody (including people who hadn’t trained yet but wanted to) showed up.

I’ve found that the jobs where I spend a month talking to folks and telling them I can help them with what they need, the “getting things done” part goes a lot smoother. You need to get people to want to work with you. Listening, genuinely listening to them, is the first step.