
Why Most Business’ Policy Changes Don’t Stick (Hint: It’s The Employee Training)
Building a great training program is deceptively hard. For example, let’s say you change your refund policy and expect a savings of around $50 per refund. You train your customer service team and launch the new policy. Refund amounts go down, but not as much as you...

The Best Way to Help Your Employees Retain What They Learn in Training
We often think we know something better than we actually do. For example, most customer service reps go through lengthy training sessions to learn what they should do in different situations. These sessions usually include a quiz at the end to “certify” knowledge of...

Is Memory Still Important?
At this stage of the information revolution, can we finally stop worrying about memory? We have managed to outsource factual recall to machines that are far superior to our faulty neurons. In the past knowing things was important. We needed to know the history of our...

Memory Retention: Instructional Design Tips #5: User Engagement – Fun!
In the last post on Instructional Design Tips I listed the five strategies Hickory uses to maximize user engagement: Setting user expectations. Aligning Hickory with training milestones. Managers conveying the importance of Hickory. Making users active stakeholders....

Memory Retention: Instructional Design Tips #4: User Engagement – Stick and Lures
Everyone is busy, and one of the most important benefits of Hickory is that it is so efficient. Reviews generally take less than two minutes a day. Completing a lesson, usually 5-8 minutes. Users repeatedly tell Hickory that they like the platform as a way of learning...

Memory Retention: Instructional Design Tips #3: The Rollout Schedule
In previous posts I’ve talked about the curriculum plan that Hickory develops for each client and how we decide what content to cover in the Hickory lessons. Timing is also important to the curriculum plan. Here, the basic principle is that we do not want to make...