The World Health Organisation defines one cause of work-related stress as “having too much (or too little) to do.
Your employee learning and development programme must balance the needs of your organisation, your learners, and also their capacity to undertake training tasks.
One simple way to overcome this issue is to create smaller modules or learning experiences. Rather than asking colleagues to spend an hour on a course – or longer to attend a workshop – you can divide lessons into smaller, more digestible chunks.
“Both the business press and the organizational literature have identified a ‘time famine,’ in which people feel that there are never enough hours in the work day.” (Perlow, 1999).
This approach may also reduce the cognitive over-load that can occur when learners are asked to remember lots of facts at once. Instead, the key messages are split across time and space.