Humor can have immense benefits when added to employee training. For trainers, humor acts as a break from heavy or extensive content. It also helps in providing relief from mental exhaustion and makes the training more refreshing.
Most importantly, it gathers employee attention. Thus, including humor in training programs would increase engagement and productivity among the employees.
Humor comes as a different skill set in itself. Using it for your training or any other work would only make it more fun and engaging. It might not be the most important of all the elements required in the training. Although still, it results in the interest and creative outcome of the training course.
How to add humor to Employee training?
1. Setting humor right from the beginning
The staff would become passive and stressed from prolonged training. Humorous beginnings to the training would get the employees’ attention and interest faster.
Additionally, this would encourage the workers to stick with the training schedule. Due to the addition of humor, the training’s endurance would also not be affected. This is because it would encourage employees to learn in a fun way.
2. Using humor in the right place in the right way
Including humor is definitely a plus point, but to use it occasionally at the required place is also important. This is to make sure that the seriousness of the training is not being lost.
The main purpose and goal of the training should remain intact and prior to all other things.
3. Using humor as illustrations
Humor can best be used to explain complicated steps in training. It could be used as an example and illustration. This would make the concepts easier and more interesting to understand. This could involve comparing one thing to the other in a humorous way. Adding fun games could also be included to yield better results.
4. Enforcing humor to enhance remembrance
Humor should be used in such a way as to make the training program less forgettable. The staff members would retain the concepts discussed. It would be more engaging if humorous aspects, such as lighthearted jokes and topics of the members’ interests, were used.
Mnemonics serve as a good illustration of this. It makes it easier for concepts to be retained. It preserves the information intact in the perceiver’s memory and lessens the likelihood that it will be forgotten.
When can humor go wrong?
Its effective enough to use humor as an important tool to enhance your training. But it is also essential to understand that too much of it could turn out to be a big negative.
Here are instances where humor becomes a drawback:
1. Using repeated and exceeded humor
It is alright to add humor as a secondary element. To keep on repeating this would lose the gist of the entire employee training for which it had been initiated.
The purpose is to create an official space to develop innovative ideas. The addition of humor should be used to carry forward this. The exact opposite should not happen.
2. When it is not connected to the content
Humor must be used in connection with the subject matter being presented. It shouldn’t stray off the subject. The goal of making the subject simple and understandable won’t be achieved in this way. Instead, it would distance the workers even further from the context and content.
3. When it impacts an individual negatively
Jokes should not be turned into insults. Equal value and respect have to be intact in the workspace. Any humor that insults demeans, or jokes about any individual can make the person feel low and hurt their sentiments. This should be clearly avoided in order to keep a healthy environment among peers.
4. Build an interactive training program!
It is clear that humor when used in an effective manner would provide the following results.
- Better Understanding
- Help remember the content longer
- Grabs greater attention
- Makes the course interesting and engaging
There are a number of ways through which humor could be used in employee training programs. Start by analyzing your topic for training and then add humor related to it.
Employing humor creatively in a training would result in a productive, fun-filled, and healthy workspace to be working in.
Know how can you build training modules for an effective and engaging training program: How do I make an excellent training module template? – Acadle Blog
