Do you ever feel unproductive while driving to work?
I’m all about cranking up my music and letting my hair fly in the wind – but are there ways to maximize our time other than letting off steam before walking into the office?
Here’s a poll: If your boss mandated or simply offered audio training materials on topics such as personal development or motivational speaking to listen to on your drive to work how would you feel?
Think of the benefits. From the boss’s perspective – he’s pounding quality training into his employees without spending valuable company time. From your perspective – you’re being more productive and utilizing lost time in an efficient manner by strengthening your skills or perhaps being uplifted on a lazy morning commute. (New Year’s resolution might I say? —- being more productive??)
What do you think? Would you be interested?
Or are you just in a committed relationship with Rhianna and Michael Buble?
Sorry, boss, but unless you are paying me to listen to that, I’m not gonna do it. However, if my coworker suggested it, I may listen to it.
Wouldn’t it be better to MINIMIZE your commute? Leave the suburbs and the car, take public transportation or bicycle, or carpool and actually talk to other human beings?
Kevin, would you prefer the traditional employee training methods – on-site/on company time? I definitely hear your point about MINIMIZING your commute and having ACTUAL interpersonal communication outside of work – but what about training itself? Is it worth thinking outside the box and having employees trained through different modalities and time frames?
I would do it, esp if the boss/company/agency recognized it. Rewards are important. I am re-learning Spanish on my own in the car, just for fun and to keep my mind active.
Michelle, I think training needs to be outside the box, especially for people that don’t like to be boxed up.
Maybe I’m just used to bad, one-size-fits-all training that, in many cases, is just wrong/obsolete (especially any tech-related training), but if I have to listen to a motivational speaker to get motivated to do my job, then my supervisor is doing it wrong.
With state budgets being slashed, one of the the first things to go is travel and training. Give me an opportunity to go to DrupalCon or a social media roundtable and I’m eager to go. But that isn’t happening. Instead, we get canned seminars that are so generic that they are not worth the time, or Stephen Covey smarm.
There are plenty of people that would be happy to listen to a podcast or similar product while they are driving. I could not pay attention to the content and safely drive or cycle at the same time, but others may not have that problem. If it works for them, they can have at it.
And all that being said, the more that HR can do to provide a spectrum of training tools, the better.
Some training modalities will simply not work; e.g., eBook version of training materials while driving. And, if the person doesn’t cue to aural training, perhaps audio training in their car wouldn’t be the best use of their time either.
RE: Boss offers audio training materials — I’m hoping s/he licensed the content for the number of users or are we borrowing some Nightingale audio CD’s purchased fifteen years ago? 😉
Personally, I find it distracting to safely engage in audio training or ebooks while driving, particularly in DC traffic. I would miss an important point or sentence when someone slams on their brakes in front of me or suddenly cuts in my lane, and then it’s not easy to “rewind” the material or regain your previous train of thought. I think a better use of time and energy would be to go through those types of training materials on a telework day, when your attention is not divided.
I also think for many people, the drive to and/or from work is their personal decompression time and a time to transition out of the employee/job modality into the husband/wife/father/mother/other role.