Eroding Organizational Capacity: The “Unstructured, Haphazard and Ad Hoc Task Training Effect”

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.  

If you work long enough for a variety of employers, there is one theme that seems to run common to all – the lack of structure to the all important job-based training that one would expect. Often we are shown our workstation, introduced to the area manager and then we wait for some guidance and training for what is expected of us. Sometimes we wait in vain. Sometimes we are subjected to bits and pieces of information and take it upon ourselves to make sense of them rather than wait.

None of our core skill bases and work-based task mastery history are, alone, sufficient enough to substitute for the need to know the best practices for performing the tasks for which the new employer hired us. If an employer hires a new employee not having a structure to quickly transfer job expertise from the incumbent experts to the new-hire, it is fair to say this runs counter to good business practices and economic principals. Yet unstructured, haphazard and ad hoc task training is the norm.

“Only 17% of organizations said they had developed processes to capture institutional memory/organizational knowledge from employees close to retirement, while just 13% said they were providing training to upgrade the skills of older workers.”
IndustryWeek Magazine April 10, 2012 by Steve Minter

We all know that inaction to rectify this doesn’t make sense, but many managers dismiss the concern and take comfort in group-thinking, “this phenomenon is the norm, why not apply my efforts elsewhere since I will not be judged on something that appears to others to be beyond my control.” Some see a problem because this deficiency has become the norm. Others see it more critically as a threat to current and future organizational capacity and competitiveness and would be receptive to the following discussion.

How does organizational capacity erode? A “real world” example will put this problem in context. A department in a company or organization has 5 employees who have been there a long time and have mastered all of the required tasks of the job classification, so the departmental capacity reached 100% because the average individual worker capacity averages 100%. All work flows through the department at a smooth, often faster than expected rate and workers actually find themselves with nothing to work on since the volume of orders is below the department’s capacity.

One day, two people announce they are retiring in 2 months. The human resources department springs into action and recruits and hires 2 replacements. Since the work done at this organization is so unique it is unlikely that 2 perfect matches would be found in the local workforce, so the 2 people with the most transferable core-skills are hopefully selected and it is assumed that the department incumbents can train the new-hires for what is needed to be done. At the moment of transition, the capacity of the department will drop approximately 29% (with 5 employees @ 100% individual and departmental capacity see added 2 employees with 0% capacity until trained; (100% * 5) + (0% * 2)/7 = 71% average departmental capacity)). In addition, 2 of the remaining departmental experts will now have to drop what they are doing to train the new-hires, further lowering capacity for as long as it takes to derive capacity from the new-hires.

Unfortunately, like most companies there is no structure in place to train new-hires. Things worked so well for so long and no one needed to be hired anyway, so management did not think a training program was necessary. And unlike most companies, no one in management thought to capture the “expertise” or “tribal knowledge” in their expert’s heads to help accelerate the expertise transfer. Consequently, the 2 incumbent experts who are now untrained trainers have to try (each in their own way) to recall all of the details they needed when they first learned each task, which they suppressed long ago as they evolved into an expert operating in automatic mode.

In each instructor’s case, the level of recall is different, the style of training is different, the time allotted for training is different and the level of motivation to train is different. Adding to the difficulty, the level of learning ability of each new-hire is different and the new-hire will not know what is being left out of the informal training or which questions to ask without guidance. Nevertheless, the 2 new-hires (if they were retained) are now confirmed as part the department’s 5 member team. Unfortunately since there is no attempt at record keeping, no one knows which tasks the new-hires were taught and mastered, and if the new-hires were taught/learned the “best practice” for each. Obviously, the departments 100% capacity rating is now unknowable, but most likely the new-hires could not have learned and mastered all of the tasks required of the job classification in the 2 month transition period.

A few months later one more incumbent in the department announces a retirement date, and the process is repeated. Within 1 year, all 5 of the original incumbents are replaced by new-hires. Without a structure to transfer expertise and best practice task performance – task-by-task – an inventory cannot be taken to see how much of the 100% individual and department capacity this transition has maintained. Without a structure and with the depletion of the original supply of subject matter experts, some of the new-hires are asked to join in the training of new-hires and the quality of the new expertise transfer declines even further since they may not yet be technical experts.

Eventually, the department which once had 100% capacity stabilizes at around 40-50% capacity. Bottlenecks emerge where there were previously none, orders cannot be delivered on time, clients move to other suppliers and the costs of unstructured on-the-job training continue to rise…for years. But tragically this phenomenon is not isolated to one department, it exists across all departments – horizontally and vertically. If you doubt this and have worked in several departments for one company, or several jobs across several companies, stop and revisit your experiences in your mind. Proactive Technologies, Inc. finds empirical evidence of this phenomenon at the start of every project for clients for which it sets up a structured on-the-job training program as they inventory incumbents to the job/task data collected. As the structured on-the-job training program is implemented, it quickly works to close this gap and raise all incumbents and new-hires to the same high bar of “full job mastery” through the “accelerated transfer of expertiseTM.”

Industry has not stopped talking about their unpreparedness in dealing with this dilemma. A few years ago an EHSToday report stated, “The loss of talented older workers is described as “a problem” or “a potential problem” for their organizations according to 72 percent of the human resources professionals polled.” “HR managers said that their companies have taken the following steps to prepare for the loss of talented older workers who retire:

Increased training and cross-training (45 percent)
Developed succession planning (38 percent)
Hired retired employees as consultants or temporary workers (30 percent)
Offered flexible work arrangements (27 percent)
Designed part-time positions to attract older workers (24 percent).”

Published in EHSToday, April 9, 2012 by Sandy Smith from findings in a joint poll released
April 9, 2012 by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and AARP of employers.

Steve Minter, IndustryWeek Magazine reported in an April 10, 2012 piece regarding the same poll results, “Only 17% of organizations said they had developed processes to capture institutional memory/organizational knowledge from employees close to retirement, while just 13% said they were providing training to upgrade the skills of older workers.”

This lack of preparedness is a major contributing factor to the growing “skills gap” and industry’s propensity to wait for someone to solve the problem for them. This has not happened in the 30 years Proactive Technologies has been helping employers build internal structured on-the-job training infrastructures for all critical job classifications and manage its implementation to not only deliberately and effectively turn back this tide but significantly increase each worker’s value. But in each case it would never have happened without management’s recognition that the problem is a real, serious threat and the organization should have started to address it yesterday.

For those who have reached this level of awareness and concern, why hesitate? Learn more about Proactive Technologies’ systematic approach and the cost-effective investment your organization can make to solve the problem once and for all. View a 13 minute preview of upcoming live online presentations.