Workplace Communicator Blog

Three Tips to reduce the time to Induct New Starters (Part 1)

In many companies, time is precious.  And finding the time to train is problematic.

After all, how do you communicate all the relevant issues to staff when time is limited?

When I go to see companies who are taking 30 minutes or more to induct on fairly standard issues, I know I'm able to reduce their induction training time by around 50-67%.  That's because they are all inducting the old-fashioned way.

Usually, they show me pages and pages of text printed out in PowerPoint.  I know if I flick through it, I'll be lucky to find more than three pictures.  And then there is the writing style, it's always very formal and quite frankly, difficult for anyone to understand.  Usually, they have workers that haven't finished school., so I know that their training will not be engaging workers as well as it could be.

To reduce training time, you need to re-think how you put your training materials together.  Reducing training duration does not have to mean reducing training quality.  Here is the first tip to both improve your inductions and reduce the training time.  As there is lots to say about each tip, they will appear in a series over the next two weeks.  Tip number one is:

1.  Create training materials that are visually based.  According to John Medina, the author of Brain Rules, reading is inefficient as we have to identify certain features in letters to be able to read them.  Our brains interpret every letter as a picture.  Reading lots of words creates a bottleneck,  which actually chokes your brain.  Instead,  use visuals to represent each new learning message.  Get the visuals to do the talking, rather than lots of text.

Researchers have found that ideas are that are best remembered are displayed as pictures or paired with words, rather than just a single word.

Called the Picture Superiority Effect (PSE), people will only remember 10% of what you say 72 hours later.  However, if you add a picture it goes up to 35% and if you add both a picture and word together it increases to a very high 65%.

According to the  Creating Passionate Users blog, a pile of evidence supports that people learn more deeply from words with pictures than from words alone (Mayer, 1989b, Mayer and Gallini, 1990; Mayer, Bove, and others, 1996.), and overall, several studies combined have shown a median percentage gain of 89% effectiveness.

However, the trick to using pictures and text effectively is to put the text as close to the item in the picture you are talking about.  This brings us to another big complicated term.  It's called the Spatial Contiguity Principle (SCP).  This has found that students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.

The text needs to be integrated with the picture for maximum effect.

In five different tests, one group was exposed to text placed below the illustration, while the second group was exposed to text placed near the illustration. Although both groups saw identical text and graphics (with the only difference being placement of the text), in all five studies the second group performed better on subsequent tests.  When a reader has to keep switching between the graphic and its description, they have to work harder... on the wrong things. There’s only so much mental bandwidth in a reader’s brain, with most of the bandwidth required for making sense of the actual topic, not for making sense of the way the topic is presented.

This means that you would place the title for meerkat like this:

Vision is possibly the best tool we have for learning anything.  In the words of John Medina, "Vision trumps all other senses".  To our cortex, there is no such thing as words.

So by including more visuals in you induction training you reduce training duration but also improve memory recall.

Stay tuned for tip number two.