De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
Cartoons. Gold stars. Terrible acting. It’s all there.
Dit artikel komt uit The Economist
Illustration Paul Blow
Workplace training can confer useful skills. It can also prevent legal trouble and fulfil compliance obligations. And it can be a very easy way to try out time travel. You only have to watch a typical corporate training video to feel the clock rewinding.
First, and most obviously, some of these videos were filmed before you were born, on a subject that is so evergreen it has never needed an update. The footage is grainy. Men wear ties and women wear pleated skirts. They have names like Rodney and Carol. No one has a tattoo or brings their whole self to work. If they had an illness, it wouldn’t be a mental-health issue but something from the distant past, like consumption or scrofula.
De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
Some training videos may have been made recently but still look incredibly dated. That’s because they are produced on the cheap, feature terrible actors who cannot find other work and have been given the remit of achieving the longest possible shelf-life by not showing anything too contemporary.
Watch a video on harassment at work, for example, and you are likely to see men in high-viz jackets pretending to shout at each other while a narrator warns that „horseplay” can get out of hand. Horseplay? Harassment can leave people feeling isolated, you are told, as someone sits in a digger and looks isolated. You haven’t seen performances this bad since a nativity play.
Second, plenty of training materials are on subjects that require no training. To watch some corporate videos is to be treated like a particularly dim child—or, more accurately, like someone a particularly dim child would consider to be a moron. Your columnist recently completed an online video course on workplace slips, trips and falls, and was left wondering how the species has managed to survive so long.
There were warnings about wet leaves and the dangers of transitioning from outdoors to indoors. There were moments set aside for deep reflection on questions such as: „What are the most common things that you slip or trip on in your typical day-to-day [sic]?” And there were remarkable new insights. It turns out that slips can be avoided by ensuring you wipe the soles of your shoes on a mat when entering the premises of a building. Note that word „soles”. You can spot an untrained worker a mile off by the way they lie down and flap around like an elephant seal on heat as they try to dry the tops of their shoes.
Third, lots of training videos lean very heavily on the techniques of primary schools. When you’re not watching wooden actors, you’re being fed cartoons. Every so often, multiple-choice questions test your level of understanding. The slips, trips and falls course features a waiter who had not noticed that „the decorative rug at the entrance to the dining area had lost its grip.” He had caught his foot on the edge of the rug, stumbled and regained his balance. What type of incident had he experienced: a slip, trip or fall?
It’s hard to conceive of a lower-stakes scenario than a waiter not falling over, but your inner toddler is given an incentive to care. If you get a multiple-choice question right on a training video, you will probably win a badge or a gold star. Ace the entire test, and confetti will fill the screen and you will get a downloadable certificate of achievement. Fail to finish the course, and you will be reported to the teachers.
Treat an audience as if they are children and their behaviour will revert to childish norms. You might be approaching retirement but you still get a tiny thrill from getting a gold star. You become insanely proud of your slips, trips and falls certificate, and pin it to your cubicle wall. You wonder to yourself whether you could take the course on how to use stepladders, and shake your head at your own wild ambition.
You also succumb to the urge to cheat. You start playing a cyber-security training video on avoiding phishing, smishing and quishing, and pay it attention only when it requires you to press the „next” button. If there are no penalties for failing the multiple-choice quiz, you just skip the training and go straight to the test. You click things randomly until you pass with distinction, and are awarded a phishing, smishing and quishing certificate.
It’s just like school: you have a credential but have absorbed almost nothing. Which is why, when you leave the office that evening, you fail to notice that a colleague has blanketed the foyer with wet leaves as a bit of horseplay.
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