Only 12% of employees feel strongly that their organization does a great job onboarding new employees. This low percentage makes sense when you consider that trainers often spend a few days throwing a large amount of information at employees and hope it all sticks. Research shows employees forget 50% of the information presented during a training session within an hour. In a week, that figure jumps to 90%.
HR and learning and development (L&D) teams put too much time and money into training content—whether for onboarding, compliance training, upskilling efforts, refreshers on core policies, benefits, and processes—for it to go underutilized or to waste.
Today’s Training Challenges
One of the biggest gaps in most training approaches today is that there is no easy way for employees to refer back to the information presented and get answers to follow-up questions. Despite your best efforts to cover everything, your employees will have questions—and lots of them. Whether it’s looking up how to pull a report or what the vacation policy is, it’s natural to need quick reminders after a training, and the information shouldn’t be hard to find. Yet, given over 80% of enterprise data is unstructured, the information is difficult for employees to find and use.
Say employees didn’t take great notes during a training session and need clarification on how to run a specific report. They know step-by-step documentation exists somewhere, but they aren’t sure where to find it. They have two options: They can take the time to scour the shared drive for the document and track down the exact part of the guide that contains the answer they need, or they can ask their trainer or colleague to find and share the documentation or take the time to re-walk them through that part of the reporting process.
The first option wastes valuable time for the employees, who should be focused on getting up to speed or contributing to key projects. This scavenger hunt for information is all too common; today’s knowledge workers waste 23% of their week scouring shared drives for the answers they need to do their jobs. The latter option of turning to colleagues for help disrupts the productivity of multiple employees at once. The employees who take neither approach and execute based on what they remember stall their own professional development, decrease organizational productivity, and increase their chances of making a costly mistake.
Continue Reading Here
