By Christopher Koch
Last week I read The World’s Worst Instruction Manual. I capitalize the phrase because there can be no doubt that instructions don’t get any worse than this – other than having no instructions at all.
They came was from a company called PIAA (catchy, huh?) that makes headlight bulbs for cars. Since I’m what some people would consider handy, I bought the bulbs online with the intent of replacing them myself.
When I unfurled the thousand micro-folds of the instruction sheet to expose its full six feet and got past all the disclaimers, warranties, language translations, and warnings about how I could kill myself (have you noticed that lawyers seem to consider almost any product potentially lethal these days?) I came upon the prose that will live in my mind until my dying day:
“To install the headlamp bulb, first remove the old headlamp bulb then install the new bulb in the reverse order.”
Upon reading it, my thoughts immediately fixed on the author. Was this a Dilbertian exercise in bureaucratic CYA trickle down, or did the writer just go totally maverick and slip it in there without anyone noticing or caring, howling with laughter as he or she did? I hope it was the latter because it may be the funniest bit of technical writing ever published.
We learn by seeing now
As a boomer, I expect those little pieces of paper with the things I buy and I expect them to say something meaningful and perhaps have some inscrutable illustrations that look like the thing has been frozen in mid-explosion, with all sorts of numbers and arcane part numbers and awkward arrows posting to the individual pieces, because that’s how my generation learned things growing up.
Not being a complete dinosaur however, I knew to Google “How to replace a headlight bulb on a 2008 BMW 328xi.” Still, the dino in me expected something written with pictures showing the relevant areas of my car. Instead, what came up was this extraordinarily helpful 90-second video, showing me exactly what to do, as if I was standing next to a mechanic. Even better, the next segment of the video talked about the delicacy of the bulb and that I shouldn’t touch it with my fingers as the oil from them could cause it to sizzle and explode (guess that’s the lethal part).
It was then that I realized that this is how the kids learn these days. SAP’s Sameer Patel has known this for a long time. In an interview with my colleague Fawn Fitter, Sameer said that boomers like me who are still running corporate training programs are confusing training with learning. We don’t get that learning isn’t just about classroom training and textbooks and demos anymore.
Don’t confuse training with learning
The newest members of the workforce, and the more tech-savvy ones of all ages, are used to learning things in bite-sized chunks, collaborating with peers, and teaching themselves how to do things by playing video games and watching YouTube videos. This chunky, always-on approach allows talent needs to be nurtured and developed continuously, says Sameer. In other words, we need to get out of a one-off or occasional training mindset and start focusing on continuous learning.
Here are some ways Sameer suggests we do that:
- Show, don’t tell. A 90-second video is the fastest, easiest way to show employees the most efficient shelf-stocking technique or the proper way to wear safety equipment.
- Find the best and make them teachers. A hotel chain identified housekeepers who had figured out how to finish cleaning a room two or three minutes faster than average, then turned those staff members into trainers who could share their best practices.
- Go with what (the kids) know. Purposeful gamification techniques help keep employees engaged while ensuring that they meet specific checkpoints and company goals. For example, new hires might earn points by proving, through a game-like application, that they have properly completed each step of the onboarding process.
Want to know what the four other bad habits we need to unlearn are? Read 5 Bad Habits HR Needs to Break in 2015.
