The People Bulletin

You know how it is. You spend lots of money on training. The delegates are all fired up and making promises to themselves to do this and change that...

And then people go back to their desks and the overflowing in-tray kidnaps their attention. After a few weeks, the fading memory of those new tools and skills hardly ripples their thoughts as they go about their daily tasks. Their performance is remarkably similar to what it was.

Hermann Ebbinghaus published a paper in 1885 describing the shape of the forgetting curve after experimenting with the natural and exponential degradation of memory over time.[1] The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve is the enemy of all training, but there are ways to combat it.

The power of repetition

One way is regular jogging of the memory on specific points. Each repetition flattens out the curve for that specific point and the memory becomes more enduring. So how can you provide a regular memory jog for the key points from a training so they reactivate in the delegates mind and thereby stick longer?

We have been using email to do this for years, and over that time have discovered some good, and some not so good ways to do this.

Feedback such as “I look forward to reading these on a Monday and it’s the only one of my regular e-mails which always gets read” indicates we are on the right track.

Memory joggers that have worked

Here are some of the key things that we have found work well in practice... 

1. Make sure that people on the training course are told they will be receiving weekly email tips on key points from the course that will help them get better results. This pre-frame is important.
2. Design a sequence of tips that touch on key points of the training in the same sequence as they were delivered at the training.
3. Weekly frequency seems to work best. We have standardised on early Monday morning and the feedback we get supports this as a good day to send them out.
4. Use an attention grabbing or curiosity creating subject line. We always put the same first word in every subject line. In our case it is ‘Alchemy’. For example, one recent email tip we sent had this subject line
   “Alchemy – Cat and dog thinking... which are you?”
5. Use HTML email format and a font such as Verdana or Tahoma which is purpose built for the screen.
6. Keep the font size larger than a normal email. This makes it easier to read, and seems more friendly and accessible.
7. Always have an unsubscribe link at the very bottom. If the emails are good it will seldom be used, but people like to feel in control. If they do not want the emails and cannot unsubscribe, they will tell others how bad the emails are.
8. Do not add any graphics at all, not even logos at the bottom. They can mess up the display on some mobile devices and can also trigger spam traps. In addition, a stark simplicity seems to enhance the credibility of the message and keep it separated from all the fancy marketing emails that we all receive, and pay little attention to.
9. Keep the format consistent over time so the emails are instantly recognisable.
10. The length is critical. Our experience is that if it is too short, people unsubscribe, possibly because they think it does not have enough value if it is short. If the length is such that on a normal computer screen the signature is not visible until you scroll, then people unsubscribe.  Try to stay between 120 and 250 words for the body of the email.
11. Have a link at the bottom of the content and above the signature with more relevant information. This could be a link to a page of the course workbook or another succinct online resource that expands on the email. Make sure that you track the clicks on the link. This is a more reliable indicator of the success of your email than an open rate figure.
12. Use a compelling sentence to set up the link. For example, “For a simple five stage innovation process, click here.”
13. When you have sent out the email tips relating to the course, keep sending out more tips. If you have done it well, you now have an audience ‘trained’ to look for and respond to the tips. Think about the way you would like people to behave differently in the workplace and build more tips around these desired changes. In effect, make the weekly tip a permanent feature, not just part of a training support mechanism. 

Top tips in action 

We were pleasantly surprised when one of our customers, a finance company, came up with this novel idea on how to use the weekly tips. Each month they had a management meeting and they would look at the weekly tips they had received. They would vote on which one was most relevant to them. Between then and the next meeting they would all do something that related to the tip, and then report back on it at the next meeting. People started competing with the news they could bring back to the next meeting on what they had achieved. The CEO was absolutely delighted. 

Another of our customers did a survey over several hundred people who were receiving the weekly tips. These tips were sent as direct support for a senior leadership programme, and then devolved to generic tips that were not related to the programme content. The survey responses included comments like “The Monday morning management tip never fails to draw my interest” and “The Monday tip prompts me to look further and sparks discussion with colleagues.”

 The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve can be beaten! 

[1] See: http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/p/forgetting.htm