Even the world’s most successful brands can’t escape the ‘Forgetting Curve’ and the detrimental impact that employee knowledge fade has on in-role performance and business productivity. The cost of employees not retaining their training remains a major problem for UK businesses, but the good news is that employee-centric Artificial Intelligence provides a guaranteed way to stop it.
GOV.UK estimate that employers invest around £42bn in training their employees each year. Still – despite this mammoth investment – many employees are unable to retain and recall what they have been taught. Businesses aren’t getting the desired results they want from their training either. So, what’s going wrong?
Fundamentally, employers are guilty of ignoring brain science – and losing billions to completely preventable people-based performance issues every year. The simple fact is that most traditional employee training methods don’t actually consider the way that people learn and retain the wealth of information they need to optimally perform their jobs.
You may have heard this before, but you’ve (ironically) forgotten…
The Forgetting Curve isn’t new, but it’s still as relevant today as it was when it was first pioneered by German psychologist – Hermann Ebbinghaus – who scientifically established that we forget as much as 80% of what we are taught within the first 30 days when there is no attempt made to retain and reinforce it.
Think about it this way: let’s say that you are training 1,000 employees on a new product roll out. It’s going to impact changes to your service delivery and processes, so you want to conduct a classroom-based session to stress the salient points to your teams. You reasonably expect it’s going to take five hours to complete the training. Let’s say the estimated labour cost alone to train these employees stands at £70,000ii (excluding the training labour cost of the person/team responsible for delivering it).
The Forgetting Curve begins as early as the 20-minute mark and – as the science dictates – your employees will forget around 42% of what they’ve just been trained, with the employer having spent around £29,400 on labour (not forgetting the impact cost of the productive time being lost from employees being taken away from doing their day jobs).
Without a post-training knowledge reinforcement strategy in place, the knowledge fade process continues to impact employees and the business. So – by the 30-day mark – the majority of employees will now have retained around 20% of what they have been taught, with the cost of labour now standing at £56,000.
Still, a post-evaluation of the training session should provide some valuable evidence into how much employees have retained, yes?
Well, not so fast, because if the CIPD’s Learning and Skills at Work Survey report is representative of wider Learning & Development processes, the most commonly reported way that L&D initiatives are evaluated is by “participant satisfaction”, with only a small minority of organisations assessing learning transfer in relation to knowledge, skills and behavioural changes.iii Satisfaction surveys are important, but do they provide genuine evidence to L&D that the salient points of the learning session has genuinely landed and will be retained for in-role use moving forward?
Now, the irony is that most employers are acutely aware that transient training issues (i.e., the process of employees forgetting over time) is a known primary cause that detrimentally impacts the performance of their organisation.
For example, in the UK Government’s Employee Skills Survey (ESS) Reportiv – one of the world’s largest business surveys in which over 81,000 employers took part in the last wave – the report found that:
· 79% of all employee knowledge and skill gaps are caused entirely by transient factors.
· 66% of employers state that they know transient training factors impact their establishment’s performance.
· 53% state that specialist skills or knowledge required to perform a job role is the most prevalent specific skill lacking among staff.
Knowledge reinforcement, not training tick boxes…
The CIPD report also found that only a third of the 1,219 L&D professionals surveyed are ‘proactive’ in identifying performance issues before recommending a solution, and only a quarter design and make recommendations using evidence-informed principles to address performance issues.
In fairness, it’s no surprise that barriers to evidencing the impact of L&D have intensified due to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, over the last 12 months, the survey found that webinars, massive open online courses and in-house curated content topped the bill in terms of the top three L&D initiatives funded for employees – and the reliance on these ‘default’ methods haven’t changed dramatically from a pre-covid perspective.
These ‘large-scale information-dump’ ways of training our employees contradicts everything that behavioural learning science tells us that we should be doing.
‘Good’ training should require employees to embed knowledge through spaced learning and repetition. This method works with the brain’s natural consolidation processes, which take place at night when we sleep. And, by spacing and continually testing knowledge through reinforcement, knowledge retention – particularly of what employees often codify as ‘boring’ – sustainably and consistently improves through the process of memory recall, resulting in employees being able to apply their training in-role.
So, if learning programmes aren’t built upon the foundation of learning science, and are being conducted in a single-point-in-time fashion – without any reinforcement post-training (apart from a satisfaction survey) – is it really any wonder that employees continually fail to put into practice what we need them to know in order to optimally perform their role?
Or, to put it another way: is it any wonder that employees quickly fall back into old habits that don’t align with your organisational priorities, keep making the same repeated errors or fail to follow your documented processes?
To compound matters, over a three-year period, we analysed over 100 million employee competency assessment questions in some of the world’s leading brands and found that (pre-intervention) the average level of tenured employee knowledge stands at around 52%, meaning employees know around half of what their employer needs them to know.
Thankfully, employee-centric AI is leading the charge on mitigating the costly and detrimental impacts of employee knowledge fade for businesses. Appropriate technology – such as Clever Nelly from Elephants Don’t Forget – recognises that organisations have the complicated task of delivering effective and evidential learning solutions without impacting operations, productivity and BAU.
Using the established principles of spaced learning, repetition and self-testing, AI is able to support individual learning at scale, automatically repairing knowledge gaps through micro assessment techniques in less than two minutes per day, and evidence the impact that knowledge improvement and behavioural competency changes are having on business performance.
Fundamentally, training your employees is a costly exercise if it doesn’t translate to improved in-role performance and business productivity. Even the world’s most successful brands – such as Microsoft – acknowledge that they are not immune to employee knowledge fade.
Using AI, Microsoft are able to continually assess and quantify the outcomes of their L&D initiatives and, by recognising the science behind how their employees learn, were able to improve and sustain employee knowledge in critical customer care areas by 19% across specific lines of business in under eight months.
These improvements in employee capability came with no detrimental impact to operational productivity either, and specifically supported them to improve KPIs including First Contact Resolution by 9%, Customer Satisfaction by 5%, and reduced Average Handling Time by 12.5%. In addition to the operational cost benefit, increases in employee operational capability also positively impact areas pertaining to customer retention, NPS and ESAT. If you would like to read more about how simple it is to implement a spaced-learning approach, the full case study is available to read here.
To conclude, it’s a fact that businesses want results from training their employees, so there has to be a culture of continual learning in place to achieve this. Delivering training as a ‘one-time event’ and then expecting our employees to be able to recall everything they learn is unrealistic and places huge demands on our people.
Genuine performance results aren’t derived from ticked boxes on training scorecards, training satisfaction surveys, or the number of training modules being completed. Genuine results are derived from training being genuinely learned, retained and applied on the job – and the results of improved employee capability being evidential in the number of reduced errors people make, how quickly and efficiently KPIs improve, and how business performance is evidentially impacted.
To continue using the same training methodologies that do not support behavioural learning science – and expecting to get different results – is the definition of madness.
