Two Profound Facts about Employee Performance

There should be a requirement that anyone who manages people should have also raised at least one child. I don't really mean that, but raising children certainly helped me understand adults. There are so many similarities. I first learned this when my daughter was very young. I had decided that it was time for her to clean her perennially cluttered room. I pointed out to her the shelves and boxes where she was to put her toys. Then I instructed her that she was not to leave her room until it was clean and then left for more important duties, like reading the sports section of the paper.

When I came back to check on her, she was sitting in the same spot I had left her in and nothing had been done. I told her that the whole day was going to be gone and she wouldn't be able to play. She complained but I hung tough. This interaction repeated itself several times and each time I got more frustrated. Why was she being so stubborn?

Finally my wife took pity on me and went up to our daughter's room. When she came down she said that the problem was being solved. I asked what the secret was, my wife informed me that our daughter didn't know HOW to clean her room; that she needed to be walked through the process of putting toys in boxes and on shelves. This seemed bizarre to me. But when I looked at the room, it was clean.

I still had the room cleaning episode in the back of my mind the next day at work. We had too many deviations caused by incomplete or inaccurate batch records. Percentage-wise it was a pretty low number. But it didn't take many before our whole QA department was occupied tracking down errors.

I had been preaching and pounding the table about these deviations at staff meetings for a year. Everyone claimed that the problems were not due to lack of effort. Based on previous performance I tended to believe it. My staff was not afraid of hard work. But nothing we had tried had made a dent in the number of deviations.

It was clear that delegating this problem had to stop. I had to look deeper into it myself. As I talked to employees and compared the types of errors we had with operators' experience, a faint light dawned. The notations required on the batch records that seemed so obvious to managers like me who had years of broad experience in the industry were NOT obvious to young operators who only knew the job they were in. The errors we were getting were the result not of carelessness, but lack of knowledge.

This is something that I should have known. I had interviewed and hired many of these employees. I had seen their dedication in many circumstances. I pulled out my notebook and wrote down the following.

Profound fact #1: Employees will do the job right if they know how to do it. Knowledge + Dedication = Performance.

The next question was why they didn't have the knowledge they needed. The training that operators got tended to be more general than specific. Also we had little in the way of testing to verify that the learning had been acquired. I knew why that was. Our training department – one person – had asked for more resources the previous year and that had been cut out in the last ditches of the budget battles.

The faint light began to glow brighter and I didn't like what it was showing. The problem was me. I wasn't connecting the dots for the employees to carry them from the general concepts that appeared in our training materials to the actual hands-on work that the employees do in their daily job.

And why didn't we connect those dots in our training? Because we didn't have enough testing and reports to clarify to management the extent of learning (or rather, lack thereof) that was actually occurring in our training program.

Our training program consisted largely of classroom training and on-the-job training. After a typical classroom regulatory training session employees would usually walk back to their regular jobs and automatically revert to habitual ways of acting. The reason is that they usually had only sat passively while someone up front droned on about some regulatory requirement.

Our on-the-job training system required that a trainer sign off when an employee had performed a job correctly under close supervision. But these sessions were usually conducted under ideal conditions by trainer who had a long backlog of work to get done. Again I pulled out my notebook and noted down:

Profound fact #2: Full feedback and transparency on learning performance is necessary for management to know how much their employees know.

We didn't have enough supervisors to stand over people to monitor compliance. However, if I could somehow satisfy Profound Fact #2, then Profound Fact #1 would give me the compliance I needed. How to do it? Well, squeezing more hours out of our trainer just wasn't going to happen. She was already overbooked.

Fortunately technology has provided an answer. E-learning systems for regulatory training can provide the testing necessary to verify that the trainees actually know the material. Learning Management Systems give feedback and reporting to managers to make the extent of learning completely transparent.

We found that implementing these systems were cumbersome in those days but it turned out to be well worth the effort. Batch record errors dropped steadily to an acceptable number within three months. Today's e-learning systems are essentially turnkey with no work whatsoever required on the part of the user.

And what about our trainer?

Good trainers are hard to find. The combination of subject matter expertise, presentation skills, and clerical exactitude needed to be a good trainer is rare in one person. What is the implication here? If you have such people, don't let them go when you introduce e-Learning. Rather, let e-learning provide foundational training for your employees and move your valuable trainers into more specialized subjects.

About the author:

Norm Howe is a Senior Partner at Validation & Compliance Institute, consultants for the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. He got his BS at UC, Berkeley, and a PhD in chemistry at UCLA. He is an adjunct professor of Regulatory Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has held many management positions in FDA regulated industries. http://www.vcillc.com