Train the Trainer training in ZurichTrain-the-trainer in the canton of Zurich: how can understanding be checked when nobody asks a question?

The canton of Zurich brings together banks, insurers, technology companies and European headquarters of international groups, with teams often working internationally, at pace and in English. For a training manager, this raises a specific question: how can misunderstandings be identified without making public participation a prerequisite?

What the literature establishes: speaking up involves risk

Amy Edmondson (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly) identifies an association between team psychological safety and learning behaviours, including seeking feedback and discussing mistakes. Psychological safety refers to a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. For trainers, this is a reason not to interpret silence as evidence of understanding: requesting clarification can publicly expose a difficulty.

A second mechanism: ask for recall rather than agreement

Henry L. Roediger III and Jeffrey D. Karpicke (2006, Psychological Science) show that recall tests can improve delayed retention of studied texts compared with rereading them. Their research concerns active retrieval from memory, not simply reporting that something has been understood. It supports distinguishing “Is that clear?” from a request to recall content without consulting the materials.

The premature conclusion: anonymous answers would be enough

An anonymous answer may reduce personal exposure, but it guarantees neither psychological safety nor understanding. In an international group working in English, a hesitant answer may also reflect difficulty expressing an idea rather than a conceptual gap. Trainers should therefore separate the accuracy of reasoning from linguistic fluency as far as possible, for example by accepting keywords or a diagram. (our executive and employee training programmes)

The limits of the evidence and of common practice

The psychological safety study concerns work teams, rather than a trial comparing multilingual training formats. The retrieval experiments use texts in an experimental setting and do not demonstrate the effectiveness of a particular approach in Zurich-based companies. These studies illuminate two distinct mechanisms; they do not establish that an anonymous questionnaire alone improves learning.

A practical check in Zurich

Within the train-the-trainer programme, a hypothetical exercise could be set at an insurance group’s Zurich headquarters: delivering a training segment in English to an international team. After inviting questions, the trainer collects a short, anonymous individual answer, without access to materials, about a central distinction in the content, then scores it against a predefined rubric: correct, partial or incorrect. The trainer records the number of spontaneous questions and the distribution of answers separately, then clarifies the misunderstandings identified. Comparing these two records across several sessions makes it possible to check whether silence actually conceals misunderstandings in this group, without claiming to measure a canton-specific effect. To go further: explore the Train the Trainer training in Zurich in the canton of Zurich, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

In pictures: Train the Trainer in Zurich

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