Every year, companies spend a fortune to train people in their teams to ensure better productivity and increased profits. But, what if this training doesn't add value to the company?
And the major reason behind this issue is the memory of the employees. While one is looking to build experts in their company, boosting employee memory is a key step that cannot be ignored.
The importance of human memory cannot be emphasized enough and it might not be a fault of the employees that they are unable to retain the knowledge and skills that they are introduced to.
Over the years, the focus on ensuring a healthy mental space for the employees and its effect on their efficiency has increased.
Memory plays a fundamental role in life, reflecting the past as the past, and offering the possibility of reusing all past and present experiences, as well as helping to ensure continuity between what was and what was going to be, making it a core part of the personal and professional growth.
No one, today, has to be stuck with whatever memory capacity their brain was born with. The human brain can be trained and psychologists have over the years advocated various ways through which one can improve memory.
There can be various reasons leading to a weakened memory as the process of information retention can be hampered at any step. This is a process where the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information.
The major factors that affect the knowledge and efficiency of the brain to retain the information it has received are content factors, environmental factors, and subjective factors as explained below:
The content factors include the volume of the content, degree of organization of material, degree of familiarity, and the structure and nature of the content. Content that is segregated into small bites is consumed quickly.
It is essential for the ones who are sharing information let's say in a big company meeting to make sure they follow it up with reminders that reassert a few core messages, a few small ones at a time. That way information is digested and retained.
Context: A lot of information without context is a simple waste of money and energy.
The staff should be able to get challenged and not simply depend on written information, but on their ability to apply it in scenario-based challenges that reflect the real-life context, they'll be up against.
Employees who show they can think in context can apply new information when it's needed most adding to the company's value.
Encoding factors are the factors that affect the encoding of information and how the information can be encoded better to ensure results. Environmental factors have not always been considered important, but they are significant to the memorization process.
Factors including temperature, humidity, noise, affection,socio-emotional climate, etc., are just a few environmental factors that affect the encoding of the knowledge process. These factors can be considered to stimulate or inhibit the encoding process.
Subjective factors are elements such as the learner's state of rest or fatigue, health, or illness that can be induced with agents like motivation, interests, and disposition, critical to the encoding process.
Providing employees with a fair idea of how the training will benefit them allows them to feel motivated and encode better.
Motivational and fun: Keeping the training constantly interesting can lead the employees to be more engaged in the training. One can ensure and build a friendly sense of competition that can drive engagement with leaderboards, scoring, and awards.
These are the metrics of participation and follow-through to the end of the program.
Support needs to be flexible and available to the employee at a time and place that works for them.
Companies can use various methods to ensure that the employee can retain and use the information he/she is provided in the training. Using challenge questions is one of the most common methods used by trainers to test employees.
Collect data, but use it wisely: Analysing the employees at the job and the data of how much they retained opens the door to effective and personalized coaching.
The knowledge retention data can also help flag potential issues. Collecting important data leverages opportunities for brands to figure out areas in which they are lacking or struggling.
Companies are enabled to spot and quickly uncover potentially damaging disconnect between sales and marketing and fix it simply by examining the data.
Over the years, companies have realized the role of brain science in changing behaviors that has a tremendous impact on urging teams forward. Organization goals are achieved when they are in sync with personal goals and companies are well aware of this fact.
Thus, they have been putting efforts towards achieving revenue growth and others via defining a direction and shaping others' behavior to acquire it. When teams remember the parts of their training, they deliver better, eventually proving to be an asset to both the company and themselves.
