Employee training – an underestimated problem

Why employee training is essential

When managing a company, it quickly becomes clear that employees need to be aware of a large number of external and internal guidelines. External guidelines are often referred to as “laws”, while internal guidelines are developed with the best of intentions by management or individual departments, or originate from the implementation recommendations of established international standards such as ISO 27001/27002.

The biggest challenges in employee training

Training courses and seminars for personal development or the improvement of soft skills are not part of this article. Rather, it is about the implementation of mandatory training courses based on existing regulations.

This gives rise to two problem areas:

1. Which guidelines do employees actually need to be informed about, in what depth and how?
2. How can it be reasonably ensured that all employees of a company actually internalize the content of the directive and have not forgotten it half an hour after the training?

Our society is certainly affected to a large extent by over-regulation. Everyone is probably familiar with regulations that seem completely unnecessary because many years of experience and the much-vaunted “common sense” appear to be sufficient for the good and safe performance of tasks.

However, this has also led to many companies reducing mandatory training to a minimum. Newly hired (and correspondingly motivated and committed) employees are overwhelmed with a vast amount of information for self-study as part of the onboarding process. The aim is often less to impart actual behavioral guidelines and more to tick off tedious compliance regulations.

However, if the guidelines concern regulations whose violation can have massive consequences for the company, including the cessation of business operations, it becomes clear that this approach is not expedient.

Depending on the sector in which a company operates, there will be different subject areas whose regulations need to be communicated particularly clearly to new employees. For a company in industrial food production, it can mean economic death if there are structural violations of hygiene regulations. A manufacturer of amusement park rides must introduce different safety concepts for its products than a producer of souvenir figures.

Regardless of the sector, however, the laws and guidelines on data protection and IT security must be observed. Gross violations of the existing data protection laws, perhaps garnished with clumsy communication with the responsible authorities, can result in severe penalties in addition to the subsequent administrative effort for the official proceedings and external advice, which can also reach an amount equivalent to the annual profit of many companies. The 4% of annual turnover or 20 million euros (whichever is higher!) as the maximum penalty has already been mentioned in many articles on the GDPR.

And IT security means the technical and organizational protection of the confidentiality, integrity and availability of company data. As an entrepreneur, perhaps as an alternative to watching a horror movie on Netflix, consider the idea of important IT systems in the company being exposed, the data being changed or even completely deleted. How quickly would the company be incapacitated and then bankrupt? How high are the costs if employees have to be paid, but can do nothing for the company apart from contributing to reducing the required heating output in the rooms because all systems are down and it is not even clear which order would have to be processed next?

As a responsible company, you really want to provide “proper” training on such topics. What forms are available for this?

Employee training: face-to-face seminar or e-learning?

Firstly, the tried and tested classroom training. It is also tried and tested because it was often the only way to impart knowledge in the past. This is because creating topic-specific training courses for self-study, which ideally also include a didactic concept, is at least as time-consuming and requires an even greater learning effort from employees than attending a seminar. However, face-to-face training also has the serious disadvantage that not only the learners have to be present, but also a person who imparts the knowledge and hopefully does not just have the outward appearance of an expert. Unfortunately, this person does not do this for free, which means that periodic repetition (e.g. for new employees joining the company) can only be an alternative for very large companies with very few locations.

e-learning presence. With modern learning management systems (LMS), course content can be created in-house or imported from authoring systems using standardized data formats (e.g. SCORM). This learning content is then assigned to the respective persons via the administration systems and they are also reminded each year to complete the standard courses again. This content is often very well designed and structured, but learners tend to click through the content quickly because hardly anyone has much time to spare these days.

There are, of course, many strategies for increasing the acceptance of such training courses. Practical relevance of the content, catchy examples and comprehensible language with a minimum of technical terms can be mentioned here.

Effective employee training through sustainable learning

Nevertheless, one problem remains: these training contents are complicated, a lot of details – often from completely foreign subject areas – have to be absorbed in the head, organized and recalled at the right opportunity. However, if you have to think intensively when recalling knowledge so as not to make a mistake, this is exhausting for everyone. The well-known psychologist Daniel Kahnemann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his research in this area, particularly in relation to behavior in economic decision-making. He and his co-author Amos Tversky describe two ways in which our brain works. They call it “System 1” and “System 2”. In very simplified terms, “System 1” is the automatism that runs by repeating activities many times, while “System 2” is our intensely analytical side, in which we perform calculations or formulate logical conclusions.

Kahnemann has written about this in his highly recommended bestseller “Fast Thinking. ” that we use “System 1” more than 90% of the time in our daily lives. This also applies to complex decision-making processes. Do you calculate the speed delta between your own vehicle and the others every time you enter the highway, link this to the acceleration potential of your car and perhaps also to the prevailing weather conditions and their effect on the grip of the road surface? Probably not, because they have experienced very similar situations many times before and know very quickly how to react. “System 1” usually performs this task so unobtrusively that they won’t even interrupt the conversation with the other passengers.

Now you observe the same situation with a novice driver. Perhaps you have children with whom you are traveling as an accompanying driver in preparation for the driving test. You will see that it is pure stress for the inexperienced driver, because he or she has not yet internalized the behavior patterns. Although the correct behavior was discussed in the driving license course and of course it sounded logical and easy to understand at the time, the actual implementation when driving onto a busy freeway is something completely different. “System 2” is totally challenged. This is why novice drivers, despite their youth, are exhausted relatively quickly, because the constant high level of concentration and the use of “System 2” are very strenuous.

Only when the various occurring patterns have been recognized through frequent repetition does “System 1” gradually take over.

The frequent repetition of short procedures is therefore a key to ensuring that complex guidelines such as road traffic regulations and the operation of motor vehicles are put into practice effortlessly and surprisingly often without error. This can change quickly if the general conditions change dramatically or situations arise that have not been experienced so often. Then “System 2” should have its hand on the steering wheel again as quickly as possible. Think of black ice, an accident in front of you or city traffic in Naples.

We also encounter the strategy of frequent repetition in institutions and in social life to reinforce activities or behaviors. It is not for nothing that the Catholic Church invented praying the rosary. And at birthday parties, anyone can easily join in at any point of “Happy Birthday”, even if perhaps not always in the correct pitch.

But what if training courses were also broken down into small chunks and the content slowly manifested itself in “System 1” as a pattern through frequent repetition that could be recalled effortlessly and automatically at any time?

Microlearning: The future of employee training?

This learning method is called “microlearning”. The problem is that you won’t make an appointment in your calendar for the short learning units, usually no more than a few lines of text. Some microlearning apps send an acoustic notification at irregular intervals and then want to be read. In times when it is recommended to reduce the number of notifications from smartphones or, if possible, to switch them off completely, it is understandable that this approach is not particularly popular. At the same time, however, users cannot be expected to remember to open the learning app even during short breaks (on the bus, waiting for the next meeting, etc.).

We have been thinking about this problem for a long time. You can find the result here. Can it be used for content of any complexity? No, only for areas of knowledge that can be divided into more or less independent knowledge chunks. Does this turn every employee into a little CISO or DPO overnight? No, but the repetition of guidelines in conjunction with graphical representations makes the content easier to remember. Like so many things in the management of a company, it is a compromise. We can’t scientifically prove that it’s the ideal training method, but there are definitely worse ones.