Corporate Training Videos Are Wonderfully Stuck in Time

Corporate training videos promise genuinely helpful skills, fewer courtroom problems and satisfied regulators. They also offer perhaps the cheapest available form of time travel. Press play on a standard workplace film and feel the decades slip away.

Why corporate training films feel like time machines

The effect starts with how old many films look. Several appear to have been shot before you were born, on subjects so timeless no remake ever seemed necessary. The picture is fuzzy. Male characters wear neckties, female characters wear pleated skirts. Everyone answers to names like Rodney and Carol. There are no tattoos and no talk of bringing your authentic self to work. If anyone is unwell, it is not with a mental-health condition but with something antique, like consumption or scrofula.

Even new videos feel out of date

Other films may be newly produced and still feel remarkably dated. That is usually down to three things: tight budgets, hopeless performers unable to secure alternative employment, and a brief to ensure maximum longevity by avoiding anything recognisably modern.

Workplace harassment and the warning about “horseplay”

Take a typical clip about workplace harassment. You will probably see figures in high-viz jackets feigning arguments while a voiceover cautions that “horseplay” might escalate. Horseplay? The film then explains that harassment can make victims feel isolated, illustrated by a person sitting alone in an excavator looking lonely. The acting has not looked this weak since a school nativity.

Lessons that need no teaching

A great deal of material covers topics that need no instruction at all. Sitting through certain company clips means being handled like an especially slow pupil — or, more precisely, like someone even an especially slow pupil would deem an idiot.

Your correspondent recently finished a web-based series about slips, trips and falls at work, afterwards wondering how humanity ever survived this long.

Slips, trips and falls: damp foliage and the soles of your shoes

Alerts covered damp foliage and the peril of moving between outside and inside. Pauses invited profound contemplation of prompts such as: “What are the most common things that you slip or trip on in your typical day-to-day [sic]?” Then came startling new knowledge. Apparently skids are preventable by wiping the soles of your shoes on a mat upon stepping into a building. Mark that word “soles”. Any worker lacking preparation is instantly recognisable from afar, reclining and wriggling like a rutting elephant seal in an effort to dry the uppers of their footwear.

Cartoons, quizzes and stickers for grown-ups

Countless training films also borrow extensively from elementary-school methods. Between scenes with stiff performers, animation arrives. At intervals, multiple-choice items check comprehension.

The slips, trips and falls module includes a server who overlooked that “the decorative rug at the entrance to the dining area had lost its grip.” His foot snagged the rug edge; he lurched yet recovered his equilibrium. Which category of event had occurred: a slip, trip or fall?

It is hard to imagine a more trivial episode than a waiter almost toppling, yet your inner preschooler is motivated to engage. Answer one multiple-choice item correctly and you likely earn a badge or gold star. Pass the whole test and confetti floods the display plus a printable certificate of achievement arrives. Fail to complete the module and instructors get notified.

Why adults play along — and why they cheat

Even nearing pension age, you still feel a small buzz collecting a gold star. You grow absurdly pleased with your slips, trips and falls diploma, affixing it to your cubicle partition. You idly consider whether to attempt the stepladder-use module, then laugh at your own reckless ambition.

The infantile setting likewise inspires cheating. You launch a cyber-security film about avoiding phishing, smishing and quishing, heeding it only when prompted to hit the “next” button. Where wrong answers in the multiple-choice test carry no sanction, you bypass tuition entirely and head directly for assessment. You tap options at random until earning a pass with honours, collecting a phishing, smishing and quishing certificate.

Much as at school, a qualification is gained while almost zero knowledge sticks. That explains why, departing headquarters that night, you overlook the fact that a co-worker has carpeted the lobby with damp foliage as a spot of horseplay. ■

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