Training That Takes Ten Minutes

Training length in this category is a diagnostic. A system that cannot be explained in ten minutes has been configured badly, and no amount of training fixes that.

What the ten minutes should cover

How to record a normal day.

How to fix yesterday.

Where to see your own record.

What to do when something is wrong, and who to ask.

That is the whole curriculum for someone recording time. Everything else is administration and belongs to a different audience.

If it takes longer, look at the configuration

Too many categories. If people must be taught how to choose, the list is too long. Filter it to their own work.

Mandatory fields that serve no purpose. Each one is a thing to teach and a reason to postpone.

A workflow with more than two steps for a routine entry.

Terminology nobody uses. Accounting names on a form that operations staff fill in.

Fix these before writing the training, because the training would otherwise be documentation of a problem.

Separate audiences

People recording time: ten minutes, at their desk or on their phone, in the tool.

Approvers: what an exception means and when to reject, which is a different and shorter conversation than most training covers.

Administrators: rules, corrections, period close. Hours rather than minutes, and for a handful of people.

Payroll: the export, the reconciliation, and what to do when they disagree.

A single training session for all four audiences serves none of them.

Materials that get used

One page, in the tool, at the point of the action.

A short recording of the normal case, which people watch once and forward to new starters.

A named person to ask, which is what actually gets used regardless of what is written.

Not a forty-page manual, which is written to satisfy a project deliverable and read by nobody.

What to measure afterwards

Time to first correct entry for a new starter.

Support questions per person in the first month, and what they were about. Repeated questions are a design finding rather than a training failure.

Proportion of entries needing correction.

Recording promptness, which falls when the system is awkward and is the clearest signal that something in the configuration is wrong.

New starters afterwards

The plan usually covers go-live and not month four.

Put the ten minutes into onboarding, owned by whoever runs it.

Keep the one page current, which requires an owner and takes minutes a quarter.

Without this, knowledge decays into folklore — and folklore in a system feeding payroll produces errors that look like fraud and are not.

Measure the first month

Four numbers that show whether the rollout worked.

Time to first correct entry for a new starter.

Support questions per person, and what they were about.

Proportion of entries needing correction.

Recording promptness, which falls when the system is awkward.

Repeated questions are a design finding rather than a training failure, and fixing the cause removes the load permanently.

Teach the real workflow

Education teams often mix scheduled sessions, preparation and administration. When testing time tracking for EdTech, train with those real categories rather than a generic sample project.