The term serial position effect was coined by Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, and it describes how the position of an item in a sequence affects recall.
There are two main concepts involved in the serial position effect:
The Primacy Effect: Content presented at the beginning is recalled with greater accuracy.
The Recency Effect: Content presented at the end is also more-likely to be recalled more-accurately.
In benefits communications and benefits presentations, we should be mindful of these concepts. Knowing that the positioning of content can affect recall HR should structure communications to better-minimize the effects these concepts have on your employees.
Make presentations and resources more bite-sized. Provide short videos, bite-sized learning opportunities, and brief slides to guide your employees toward understanding. Employees prefer non-linear learning, which is more natural. Naturally guide them into understanding with small learning opportunities that guide them to the next, and the next, and the next at their own pace. Long presentations, videos, or PowerPoints are taxing on employee patience and make middle-content hard to recall.
Emphasize key information at the beginning and end. Emphasize key information at the beginning and the end of brief videos. If you like to do voice-over-PowerPoints, we strongly recommend multiple short presentations with clear titles instead of one long presentation. At the beginning of each presentation, state what will be learned. At the end of each, state what was learned.
Include visual cues wherever possible. Include cues in your enrollment materials or benefits education sites. Obvious tabs, links, calls-to-action, and prominent videos or resources are critical. Make subsequent content callout to the user, “hey, over here! Watch me.”
Limit the amount of recall required. Limit the amount of recall required across all communications. Make all content easily accessible. Don’t bury content behind tabs in a ben-admin system or deep in PDFs. Prominently list videos, documents, links, addresses, terms, and more on sites or web pages. Not only do these act as cues, but they also make everything easy to access. As always, make sure all content is accessible on the web without logins or complicated passwords. Employee attention is limited.
In Closing
Benefits communications should understand the limits of employee short-term memory. Given the serial position effect, we should aim to help employees maintain quick access to relevant information, keep communications short, and make everything as entertaining as possible.
To learn more about our approach to benefits communications or our offerings, contact us a LearnYour Benefits at www.learnyourbenefits.com.
