COMMON ORGANIZATIONAL PAINS

Whether organizations train their employees to address performance issues or because they are mandated by law to do so (e.g. health and safety), they face three main challenges, which are solved by JUST IN TIME TRAINING™:

Lack of retention: Research shows that if an adult is exposed to information once over the course of 30 days, the retention rate of the information will be adequate after a few minutes or a few hours but quickly deteriorates after that: reaching 20-30% after 48 hours and only 10% after 30 days… That’s 10% ROI on budgets invested in these initiatives… Research also shows that if you continuously drip this same information over time (“interval reinforcement”), the retention rate will be 90% over the same period.

Broad stroke approach: Training is often planned with the best intentions in mind but falls short in the delivery: some corporate departments may only be able to reach out to the rest of the organization through a poster campaign, a corporate memo sent to department heads, a presentation to a group so large that individual questions are difficult to answer… At best, this approach becomes part of the ambient noise, and people tend to ignore the messages. At worse, this general communication is perceived as a waste of time and money, thus producing negative reactions and can be demotivating. The problem at hand is how to evaluate what each person knows in the organization, compared to what they should know based on their function, their expertise, etc. and only spend time on filling these
knowledge gaps.

Information overload: Training – the kind where the organization actually gets to have a team member’s undivided attention – does not happen every day. The tendency is therefore to “maximize” this time and provide employees with as much information as possible. This form of “event training” generally turns into data dumps and leads to information overload… The team member is then put back into their work context – usually with little follow up or support – and the organization then hopes that they will start implementing everything that they were taught… This rarely happens even with follow-up and support. The ideal solution would be to deliver the same number of hours of training, but in an iterative way, spread over a period of time. For effective learning to take place, the length of each training session must be very short and matching with the attention span of each team member. In addition, the training should not be perceived as cutting into the time needed to accomplish daily tasks. We call these “bite-size” or nano-trainings; they last under one minute.

The feedback we have received from the market on this is that while organizations are usually well aware of these issues, they have not found a way to solve them easily and in a cost - effective manner. Addressing these usually requires hefty investments either in people (hiring more trainers so that the ratio to employees allows for such individualized regular training) and/or cutting more into employees’ working hours and hence decreasing their output. With no demonstrated ROI attached, it is a hard sell to senior management.