The Blank Slate Oath

In last month’s blog post, we looked at some data from a client who has used Blank Slate for almost a year to close knowledge gaps across their workforce of security guards.

The results were amazing: after just six months of using Blank Slate for a few minutes a week, employees who started out with low knowledge levels had completely caught up to their coworkers who started with high knowledge levels. Those results are shared below.

This month, we’re following up to dive a little deeper into those “few minutes a week” that employees spend using Blank Slate.

That’s because, at Blank Slate, we take an oath to our clients: we will bridge knowledge gaps in your organization for just a few minutes of each person’s time per week. After last month’s results, it’s natural to wonder whether we upheld our oath with employees who started with low knowledge levels and likely needed to spend extra time on the app to get up to speed.

As you can see in the graph below, employees who started off with low knowledge levels did have to spend more time using Blank Slate each week than those with high knowledge levels. But, true to our oath, they still only spent a handful of minutes each week using the app — about seven minutes per week in the beginning, quickly dropping down below six.

Can we just pause on that point for a second?

Employees with the lowest knowledge levels in their workplace only needed to use Blank Slate for seven minutes each week to regain mastery of their workplace protocols.

That’s only one minute per day in the beginning, and the time commitment only decreased from there.

And it’s hard not to notice that, even after six months when cognitive performance equalized across all employees, those who started with lower knowledge levels continued to use the app more each week. This trend highlights the sophistication of Blank Slate’s custom machine learning algorithm. Even when all users appear to have similar knowledge levels, the algorithm tracks each person’s unique rate of forgetting and selects content for them to review to prevent memory loss. For some people, the algorithm prescribes more content to review than others to keep their cognitive performance high.

In the Venn diagram of effectiveness and efficiency, Blank Slate lies in the overlapping middle. Last month, we took a close look at effectiveness when we saw remarkable improvements in knowledge levels in a workforce of security guards. Today, we put the Blank Slate Oath of efficiency to the test. Even people with low starting knowledge levels only need a minute per day to close their own knowledge gaps.

Want these results at your organization? Get in touch

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Amy Smith, PhD

Chief Scientist, Blank Slate