Train smarter not harder: The future of eye tracking in workforce development

Companies are still facing the pressures of employee turnover and employees are still experiencing work stagnation. Eye tracking might be the key to reducing training time, raising employee satisfaction, and retaining key skills.

Why work stagnation is still a problem

It's been four years since companies worldwide faced what became known as "The Great Resignation" — a 2021 trend where employees across the globe quit their jobs in unprecedented numbers.

Today, that phenomenon is often remembered as a consequence of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. But the disruption of restrictions and the insecurity in the job market were just instigators; the early 2020s exposed some of the underlying problems employees have at their places of work.

Since early 2021, many companies continue to struggle with high turnover and workforce insecurity. But why is that? Well, stagnation at work, sluggish personal development, and de-personalized training procedures persist, leaving many workers feeling left behind.

Employees often end up switching workplaces because they feel their current role lacks long-term growth or opportunities for personal development. Perhaps their employer can’t afford the training they require, is unable to spare the expertise, or can’t provide the level of focus individuals in highly skilled positions require to further specialize.

But what if you could improve training at work, help employees feel seen and prioritized, and build personalized development programs based on their needs?

Eye tracking and training

Eye tracking technology, specifically wearable eye trackers, have emerged in the last few years as a powerful tool for decoding behavior. These nifty devices look just like a normal pair of glasses, but they contain a series of cameras and illuminators that capture what the wearer is seeing, and where they are looking.

To what end? The truth is that our visual activity varies massively based on our individual ability, knowledge, awareness, cognitive state, and surrounding context. This behavior is influenced by a variety of factors, some within our control and others outside of it. Any truly effective efficient training procedure must reckon with the variability inherent across a group of individuals, even those in the same place of work.

Eye tracking glasses let you discover and explore these differences in behavior through eye movements, empowering you to speed up training, laser focus your resources where they are needed, and nail the crucial onboarding period. All these improvements are appreciated by employees that seek development and progression — we’re talking less employee turnover and higher retention of key expertise in your organization.

The cost of poor onboarding and how to fix it

A painfully frequent problem for many employers is failing to successfully hit the ground running with fresh hires. When bringing new starters up to speed in your organization you’re dealing with a host of potential blockers:

• Perhaps your company’s safety and compliance protocols differ from the employee’s previous workplace.

• Maybe their technical skills aren’t directly transferable.

• They may even need a complete onboarding as to industry regulations and standards.

Too many employees find themselves left behind and frustrated while employers have the unfortunate experience of losing new hires early on. Creating efficient, accessible, and focused onboarding procedures has to become a priority to prevent a productivity hammer blow.

Using wearable eye trackers, it’s possible to capture the hidden skills and behaviors of experienced workers and show them to new hires. Using the gaze recordings, you can build beautifully tangible visual aids that demonstrate the key elements of your training requirements. Similarly, you can measure the attention of the trainees so that they become conscious of how their technique differs. This lays the groundwork for productive conversations and development plans for their first weeks and months in a new position.

The hidden costs of delayed development

Development, or lack thereof, is also a frequent source of angst for long-term employees. Friction often arises when an employee is seeking further specialization and training, but their employer is unable to provide the pathways to make it real.

There are many reasons why development starts to stall:

• The company might not feel able to justify the cost of training resources.

• They might not be able to free up the teachers from within the organization without affecting output.

• Sometimes, the company worries about losing employees too soon after the training, rendering it worthless.

These are valid concerns, but over time they lead to a sense of stagnation for committed long-term workers, not to mention a cooling effect on company growth. So how can we make training and development a staple of company culture, keeping staff satisfied and stimulated, ensuring employee retention, while also growing the capabilities and competitivity of the company?

Analyzing subconscious behavior using wearable eye trackers can make training and development far quicker and less labor intensive. Training can be conducted by fewer people freeing them up to continue their own work; procedures also become hyper-focused on the important stuff. In fact, companies that use eye tracking tend to find their training times are cut in half, along with their costs!

By slashing the burden of training, companies can adopt more of it and demonstrate a commitment to develop their employees — and even grow with them.

How Tobii turns training into a competitive advantage

It’s not just about making training efficient. At Tobii, we want companies to do
better training, and more of it.

Training that focuses on continuous, iterative improvement is at the core of a competitive and agile business. Finding efficiencies and areas of development isn’t always easy, but when analyzing subconscious behavior, we start to uncover previously hidden areas where tightening up efficiency is possible, and in many cases, simple.

Tobii’s wearable eye trackers and analytical software are designed to provide these immediate insights. Because they’re easy to set-up and use, they can be deployed wherever needed to help make quick adjustments on the fly.

• Got an underperforming sector? You can know why within hours.

• Trying out a new process? Find out if it’s working, without the wait.

• Training a new group of starters? Gauge their ability from the outset.

We also believe in collaborative analysis. Eye tracking shouldn’t be exclusive, and the insights shouldn’t be hidden behind a wall of numbers or smuggled into pages of graphs and charts. We believe eye tracking should be visual, clear, and instinctive. That’s what allows customers to integrate our tools into their everyday workflows and ensure they always have the edge; on productivity, but also on employee satisfaction.