How do you measure whether communication training actually worked?

Measure what people do in a real conversation before the training and again months after it, scored by someone or something other than the person who was trained. A survey at the end of the day tells you whether people liked the day, which is a different question.

By Michael Cinquino, Founder and Facilitator  ·  November 12, 2026

How would you know if you were listening better than you were a year ago? Most of us would go by how it feels, and that is the trouble. Nurses in one study rated their own effort to understand the patient as high 83% of the time. Coders listening to the recordings scored their empathy as high 31% of the time. The same 12 nurses, in the same recorded patient sessions: 25 of 30 sessions self-rated high, 10 of 32 scored high (Östlund and others, 2015).

Here's why that matters for anyone buying training. If the only measure is what participants say about themselves, the training will look like it worked. A review of 664 findings on listening at work found that three quarters of them relied on self-reports (Kluger and others, 2024). The field itself has leaned on the measure that is easiest to collect.

A measure I would trust has three parts.

It is taken from a real conversation. A recording or a transcript of a conversation the person chose, with the consent of the people in it.

It is scored by someone else, the same way every time. A trained coder, or software that counts the same things in every conversation.

It is taken again later. Across training studies, skills eroded over the six months after a workshop when no feedback or coaching followed. With feedback or coaching, they held (Schwalbe, Oh and Zweben, 2014). A measure taken the week after the day cannot see that.

I should say what this does not measure. A change in how someone listens is not a promise about what the business gets from it, and I do not make that promise.

This is why I built Heard. It scores the calls you choose, on the same measures every time, so you can see how your numbers move. Every participant in my workshop receives a free month of Heard for Meetings™.

If you want to talk through how you would measure a day with your team, book a free discovery call at cdlab.io/book.

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