The role of persuasion and emotion in training

I’ve always thought that persuasion and emotion were best left to sales and proposal presentations. After all, in an instructional setting, isn’t persuasion like propaganda?  But in my course, High-Persuasion PowerPoint Presentation Program, I’m discovering that I was wrong. Actually, a couple of my students have taught me this.

Imagine that you are training employees in a factory to follow certain procedures. If the employees don’t follow these procedures, your company’s customers may get hurt. Your company may get sued. So there’s a lot on the line.

But employees seem to forget or not care. Either way, they aren’t always following the procedures.

How do you react? Are supervisors yelling at employees and threatening to fire them?

It’s clear to me that this method isn’t effective. If you’re getting to the point where you have to yell at people on a PowerPoint slide, you need to rethink your approach.

Instead, you can use emotion and persuasion. Humor can also have a place.

Instead of yelling, use emotion to hit home. You can create slides that are very powerful in this way.

Here are two possible slides.

But be sure to positively reinforce good behavior. Mention employees who follow the rules in meetings and the company newsletter. If any employee goes out of his or her way to keep customers safe (perhaps by finding and reporting a dangerous situation), give that employee special mention, even a prize.