Imagine this scenario: your Learning and Development (L&D) department just delivered a great half-day workshop on how to best utilize a new internal system. The team worked hard to create beautiful slides, examples, and even a couple simulation activities to teach the associates how to properly navigate and input the required information for their daily processes. The associates do great, they are energized and exit survey show they feel confident they can do what is now expected of them. Your team high-five’s and looks forward to seeing the results of the good work.
However, two months down the road, the metrics don’t look promising. Follow-up survey feedback shows that employees are frustrated. They claim to not know how to find information and are starting to skip important steps in their processes. Worse, an audit reveals that many required fields are being left blank, thus making internal processes for other departments difficult, if not impossible to complete.
What went wrong? Each employee demonstrated competency at the end of the training, why are they now struggling?
The problem likely isn’t the content of your training. The problem is that your program wasn’t designed for the long term with supports in place to combat what’s known as the “forgetting curve.” The forgetting curve is a concept that has been around since the late 1800’s. It has proven to be accurate on how our brains remember information over time.
In the absence of refreshers, studies suggest that people forget up to 70% of what they learned within 24 hours. After 1 week, that percentage climbs to 90%.
So, how can you design a program that combats that curve without pulling associates out of their daily workflow? The answer is a performance support program that is designed with the brain in mind.
This is a program designed to periodically refresh learners after an initial training event. Ideally, it is designed to be consumed in the flow of work. Using multiple forms of media and strategically spaced messaging, you can help your learners move the content from their short-term memory into their long-term memory AND decrease the time it takes for them to recall the information.
Ideally, your learners will receive some form of review within 1 day of the learning event. Then again at 7 days, 2 weeks, 1 month and 3 months out. These do not need to be complete courses or lengthy video segments. Focus on the absolute need-to-know and reinforce the learning that matters most to performance on the job.
There are a variety of ways you can deliver the refresher information to your associates. Early in the program sending out short microlearning videos is a good choice to showcase the new process or skill they were taught. Later, your strategy may be to send out job aids, flow charts, or FAQ documents. Consider creating sample meeting agendas and coaching documents for managers to use with their associates during their regular 1-on-1 conversations.
To reach each associate, you will likely need to employ a variety of tools. Leverage your companies learning management system to send out “nudges” to employees to view a short refresher video course. Send out automated e-mails with the content embedded in the message. Title the message with a catchy “click-bait” style headline. Consider including associate testimonials from people who have used the new skill or process and seen improvement in their work.
If your company has an intranet site that automatically opens to a home page when they open their browsers, feature your content as prominently as possible periodically over the following months.
In the end you will want to vary what is being sent out so that associates are less likely to simply ignore the content.
Remember that even if the support documents, job aids, and how-to videos are amazing, they will not do your business any good if no one can find them easily. Do your best to limit the number of places associates need to go to find your documents. It should be a consistent location that is not buried in a SharePoint folder or across multiple web pages. Most importantly, include messaging that informs associates where to find the job aids with each communication.
In summary, to maximize the impact of your training programs, you need to design for the long-term and provide your associates with the necessary supports to combat the forgetting curve. Create a plan, space out the messaging, and make supporting documents easy to access.
We take a holistic view of our client’s learning needs, work to understand the operating model, role, and behavior changes to your organization so that the learner will be able to connect the dots across all the changes. With your partnership, we work to ensure your employees have the skills needed to succeed in the short and long term.
From Learning Strategy, Instructional Design, L&D Analytics, and more, we collaborate with you to create a customized and holistic solution that fits the needs of your organization and its employees.