Maximizing Employee Performance: The Power of Visual Training Content (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: I want to talk about some research that TechSmith did with you real quick and just get your thoughts on it. What we found was that 67% of employees perform better when communicated with visually compared to text alone. And it's according to the research, not only do they absorb information better, but they do it 7% faster. Does that seem right to you? Does that make sense?

Speaker 2: Oh, it seems more than right. And I think that that's the kind of thing where, you know, given a choice, do you want to watch a video that takes you step by step through how to do it? You want to read a book? I'll take the video any day.

Speaker 1: How does someone know if they're creating this training content, whether it's visual or not, that it's really hitting its mark and it's doing what it needs to do?

Speaker 2: It actually has to start with, why am I making this to begin with? Well, I'm making it because people don't understand how to do this. Then my question would be, how do you know they don't understand? And say, OK, so we're going to create a video. And one way that we can measure whether this video helps is that even though there may be some peripheral things going on, the primary thing that we're doing to remediate this is we're creating this video. And what we're going to do is we're going to watch scrap rate. And 60 days later, we go, we've cut scrap in half. I think the average manager would say, you know something, the video worked. But only because you had the conversation up front that said, OK, what are we trying to solve? And how do we know it's a problem? And then what would good look like? You've got a benchmark going in rather than just saying, well, success, 100 percent of the people watch the video. OK, well, no, actually, all you've done is told me that we've now used up 120 man hours. But if you tell me that scrap's gone down 10 percent and that's a saving of $22,000 a month, you say, wow, that 120 hours of watching video was a pretty good investment. And the 10 hours it took me to do the video was a fabulous investment because we're getting a $22,000 a month return every month for a one-time investment. So I think that's what you really need to do is you've got to think more about metrics and what problem you're trying to solve rather than I'll just create a video and it's got to improve performance. And you have to have that conversation before you start.

Speaker 1: Are there like things that you see that are just common mistakes or things that you just think, you know, if we'd stop doing that, we'd be a little bit better?

Speaker 2: Yeah, before you do any training, have a transfer plan, you know, because training is a process. It's not an event. And I think that way too many people are still treating training as an event. So it starts before we do the training in terms of making sure that the training solves the problem. But it also involves getting the manager on board that, you know, this is an investment. It's not a waste because a lot of managers, line managers think, well, you know, my employee isn't doing the job when they're in training. So they see training as an interruption to the job, not an investment in the job. And actually the person that has the greatest impact on whether or not training gets used, it's the manager of the person who sends somebody to training. And yet oftentimes we pay no attention to them when we're designing the training at all. And so that would be, I'd say, the biggest quick thing that somebody could do.