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Why training fails

The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve

Section titled “The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve”

In 1885, psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus published what’s now called the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve: we forget fast at first, then more slowly. He measured memory as savings, meaning how much less time it took him to relearn a list than to learn it the first time. His experiment has been replicated several times, including by a 2015 study ↗[1] that found a very similar curve. That study lists Ebbinghaus’s original savings:

  • 58% after 20 minutes
  • 44% after 1 hour
  • 36% after 9 hours
  • 34% after 1 day
  • 28% after 2 days
  • 25% after 6 days
  • 21% after 31 days

Lower savings means more was forgotten. After 6 days, relearning a list still took about three quarters of the time the first learning took.

A training course or a procedure document asks people to learn something now and use it later. The curve shows how much of it fades in between.

Human head as a filing cabinet losing process documents over days

What Ebbinghaus measured

Section titled “What Ebbinghaus measured”

Ebbinghaus memorized nonsense syllables (like “WID” or “ZOF”) to eliminate prior knowledge effects, then measured relearning effort after various intervals.

Forgetting is fastest at first. Ebbinghaus’s savings fell from 58% to 44% between 20 minutes and 1 hour, then dropped much more slowly over the following month. The 2015 study found one small bump: the curve most probably jumps upward at the 24-hour point. Sleep research predicts this, but the authors say their data can’t show that sleep is the cause. After a month without reinforcement, little is left. At 31 days, Ebbinghaus’s savings were 21%, and the 2015 replication measured 4%.

What this means at work

Section titled “What this means at work”

Companies pass on how work is done through onboarding sessions on policies, procedures and systems, procedure documents in a PDF or wiki, a yearly compliance course, and time spent sitting with someone experienced. Each of these is learned on one day and used on another. Without use in between, it fades along the curve. By the time someone needs it, much of it has to be learned again.

Where training, documents and experts fall short

Section titled “Where training, documents and experts fall short”

Training assumes people can learn a procedure in advance, hold it in memory, and recall it correctly when the work arrives. In practice, days or weeks pass between the course and the task. A training room looks nothing like the place the work happens. People are taught everything at once, including steps they won’t need for months, and nothing reinforces what they learned at the moment they need it.

Documentation has a problem of its own. If someone remembers the process, they don’t open the document. If they’ve forgotten the process, they may also have forgotten the document exists, or where it lives. Even when they find it, they still have to read and interpret it, and that leaves room for error.

When both fail, people fall back on whoever has done the work before. Those experts become bottlenecks, because everyone waits for them. New hires need long mentoring. Each expert does the job their own way, so the results vary, and the knowledge leaves when they do.

Examples by industry

Section titled “Examples by industry”

Nurses who had a full orientation on medication protocols can still miss a step months later, when a drug they rarely give comes up. The World Health Organization ↗[2] calls medication errors a leading cause of avoidable harm in health care. Bank staff trained on anti-money laundering procedures may not remember the reporting requirements when suspicious activity finally turns up. On a factory floor, a worker skips the safety step they can’t recall, and it’s harder still when the training wasn’t given in their first language. A consultancy teaches its client onboarding procedure once, and months later the steps that matter get missed.

Other limits of memory

Section titled “Other limits of memory”

Working memory holds only a few items at once, so a procedure with many steps is more than it can carry.

What you’re taught about a procedure, including its steps, is declarative memory, the memory for facts. It fades quickly without use. Procedural memory, the kind behind motor skills like riding a bike, lasts longer but takes a lot of practice to build. Business processes rely heavily on the declarative kind, so they’re easy to forget.

Memory also depends on context. Something learned in a training room is harder to recall at the workplace, and stress and time pressure make recall harder still.

How Tallyfy puts the procedure inside the work

Section titled “How Tallyfy puts the procedure inside the work”

Tallyfy doesn’t rely on people remembering a procedure. It shows each step to the person doing it, at the moment they do it.

You write the procedure once, as a template. Each step has a description for its instructions, which can hold text, images, files, links, tables and videos. When someone launches the template, its steps become tasks, and each task carries its instructions with it. People find their tasks in the Tasks view, so they don’t need to remember where the procedure is kept. A new employee gets the same instructions as everyone else from their first task.

A step can ask for information through form fields. Guidance text under a field can explain the format or link to more help. Nobody can complete a task until its required fields are filled in.

Automations change a running process based on what people enter. For example, one can show a CFO approval step only when the purchase amount is over $10,000, so people see only the steps that apply. An Approve/Reject step gives the approver two buttons, and an automation can act on the choice, such as reopening an earlier step when the work is rejected.

You can assign a step to a job title instead of a named person. Who fills that role is picked when the process launches, so nobody has to remember who handles which step.

When you improve a template, the change applies to every process launched after it. Processes already running keep the version they launched with, as templates and processes explains. Each running process also keeps an activity log of task completions, deadline changes, comments and assignment updates, so you can see how an earlier run went. And because the procedure lives in the template, it stays when the person who wrote it leaves.

Questions to ask about your team

Section titled “Questions to ask about your team”
  1. How long after training do people first use what they learned? If it’s more than a week, much of it has already faded.
  2. How many of your documented procedures does anyone open regularly? A procedure nobody opens is probably being done from memory.
  3. How often do people ask a colleague how to do something?
  4. How many errors trace back to a missed or wrong step?
  5. How long does it take a new hire to work without someone beside them?
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