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.
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