Mark Murrel
Pay attention. Is it true our attention spans are becoming, well, less attentive? After all, smartphones, social media, and all the other high tech gizmos seem to enthrall us on a daily basis. Tech can be a productivity enhancer, but it can also have a negative impact.
The accessibility of our phones and other technologies makes it easy to switch our attention to things we find more enjoyable or entertaining. This can complicate things in learning environments or at work.
When it comes to training your drivers, it’s important to know if (and for how long) they are going to pay attention to you. Can you sit them down for a whole day, or are you stuck with TikTok-level soundbites? If the real problem is a societal one (i.e., if everybody’s attention span is faltering), it might feel like there is nothing we can do to make training more compelling except make it shorter. But is it true? The answer is surprisingly straightforward.
Perception of training
“My drivers can’t focus that long. All they want is shorter training.” There’s a longstanding perception that drivers don’t like to do training (and want to do as little of it as possible), and that perception has been around longer than the recent hand-wringing about attention and focus.
What’s going on?
So, have attention spans gotten shorter and is that really the issue? The answer is that our total attention span, across all contexts, can’t be measured in a one-shot deal. Looking at a Word document (and then looking away) isn’t like playing a board game or doing safety training. Are there more distractions than there were just 10 or 15 years ago? For sure. And has that made it harder to focus on things we’re not that invested in (like Word docs or random internet videos)? Definitely. But that doesn’t tell us much about what’s going on in the context of safety training.
The truth is that attention is goal-oriented; the amount and depth of attention we pay to something depends on how clear the goal is, how desirable it is, and how engaging the process of getting there is. If your mind is locked into a movie for a solid two hours, it’s probably because the story is engaging, and you’re invested in seeing what happens. But if you’re mindlessly scrolling through social media reels, it’s because it’s not that engaging for more than a few seconds, and you’re not really invested in getting something out of it.
If your drivers are looking at their phones while you’re holding an in-class training event, it’s probably not because humanity has suffered a critical failure in attention. It might just be that they’re bored. That’s not an attention-ability thing; it’s a content, context and goal thing.
You could tailor your material to be shorter and snappier, to grab whatever attention they are giving you before they look at their phone again, but all you’re really doing is admitting that your material isn’t engaging enough and the goal of it isn’t ingrained enough in your people.
The takeaway
So, what’s the issue? I don’t think it’s true that drivers want less training. In fact, according to the most recent Best Fleets to Drive For driver survey, over 90% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that ongoing training is important.
However, there can still be some legitimate barriers to getting driver buy-in, and reasons they might be asking for shorter training. For example:
- Pay If you are paying by the mile and then pulling your drivers off the road to do training, it’s easy to see why they would be reticent to do it or, at least, would want that training to be as short as possible. But there are lots of companies out there who have addressed this head-on with either bonuses or straight pay for training.
- Relevance If the training is thin, lacks relevance or is condescending, of course drivers will want less of it. Good training doesn’t have to give the experience of an endless stream of TikTok videos, but it should push the learner to use different parts of their brain at various stages of the training. But keeping it fresh doesn’t have to mean keeping it short.
- Clear goals Like watching a movie and being invested in seeing what happens at the end, or focusing on a board game because you want to win, the goal of the training should be clear and identifiable. Connecting the action of doing training to a larger, overall, value-laden goal of safety (one that extends across all of the driver’s activities, not just during training), will solve the “why am I doing this” problem. This is particularly critical because, as we’ve seen, attention is goal-directed. Make sure they know what the goal is.
If drivers are asking for shorter training, it’s probably less helpful to write that off as a function of a waning ability to pay attention to things. Instead, think about what else might be going on —there’s a good chance that the real issue is how locked in your drivers are to your training culture as a goal and how timely, relevant, and contextual the material is (and whether or not they are getting paid). Arguments that reduce training issues to a matter of society-level attention problems aren’t the issue; there’s something else going on that needs to be addressed.
