Do You Have Worker KPI Measures in Place? If So, Are You Measuring Anything Useful?

By Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Recently, I met with the management team of a tier 1 and 2 automobile supplier to discuss the merits of structured on-the-job training (“SOJT”) for their firm. After I had toured their operation and was progressing through my presentation slides to the part dealing with the SOJT metrics and reporting that the PROTECH© system of managed human resource development provides, I was pleasantly surprised by a question I do not often hear in my presentations – especially from anyone in human resources.

This director of human resources asked what may seem like a simple question: “So can this data in these reports be used as KPIs?” After recovering from being startled, I smiled and said, “Yes! Yes, of course. That’s exactly what these reports are for and how they should be used.”

According to Wikipedia, “A performance indicator or key performance indicator (“KPI”) is a type of performance measurement. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it engages. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.”

The reason for my surprise that I was asked the question is, after perhaps thousands of presentations over some 35 years, I still receive mixed reactions to SOJT. Some react as if I’m showing them the holy grail of worker development as they express wonder at why they had not seen it before. Some seem to be underwhelmed by the broad capabilities of this approach to SOJT, the thorough recordkeeping, reporting, change control and, therefore, support for quality, safety, and engineering specifications compliance. It seems to boil down to the level of realization of the lack of adequate tools to develop and measure worker capacity as well as worker output to expectations that have led many to avoid the topic for fear of the answers; that it might expose limitations in their existing worker development strategy. It is surprising the number of companies I meet with that the only evidence of any kind of worker development performed at their operation is a few hours noted on a time sheet as “training,” when in fact every person in every job is receiving informal, unstructured and undocumented task-based on-the-job training every day. How much time in training is not as illustrative as which tasks have been mastered for the time spent.

Unfortunately, SOJT is not something taught regularly in human resource management college courses or explained in college textbooks. Students might be exposed to the term on-the-job training, but it comes across as not important and something that just occurs naturally. Courses tend to focus more on the mainstream forms of “learning (knowledge transfer)“ as opposed to “training”. Unless specializing in Training and Development, and that is no guarantee either, one’s knowledge of the complete range of tools and practices to more effectively and efficiently develop workers may be limited. It may seem adequate to have either attendance rosters thrown in a drawer or a spreadsheet of attendance of general topic learning, but that is hardly compliant with ISO, IATF or AS quality programs regarding the process-based training requirement and process knowledge capture.

Some label all learning while employed as on-the-job training. Solid manufacturing experience coupled with learning in human resources management and training/development can help bridge the gap between what is lacking in formal education alone and what the end-user needs to quickly and completely develop the needed workers to keep the operation alive, viable and able to quickly adapt when opportunities arise. The experience of being on the receiving end leaves a vivid memory. It is something we all have experienced in nearly every job assignment we have held; “Bob, this is Jim. Why don’t you show him around.” For many organizations, this is what is called “on-the-job training.” Unless the new-hire is returned to human resources with the ambiguous comment, “I don’t think this person will work out,” that person has survived and has been added to the incumbent worker list with as much unrecorded capacity as Bob informally developed.

This brings me to another observation that I have from my experience working for, and working with, employers in many fields, particularly manufacturing. Most employers seem obsessed with metrics and methods that they monitor intently for the vast majority of the operation. Yet they’ve come to an acceptance that the best you can hope for from hiring workers is a warm body that seems to fit in at some point – the same workers that are supposed to maintain and run the equipment to produce the products upon which the other metrics are focused. Ask any supervisor to explain which tasks each employee under their control has been trained on and mastered, and which tasks they have not, you might get a very abbreviated list. If the supervisor is new to the job area you might not get much of a list at all since any “training records” memorized left with the previous supervisor(s). The next question becomes, “has anybody detailed all of the tasks the employee needs to master and the best practices for each task of that job classification?” This step might not have been done either because the awareness of the critical importance has been lost or was never established. If you don’t know you have a problem, you tend not to look for solutions.

Absolutely every organization should have KPI for: 1) how well are they selecting employees with the right core and general skills upon which to train workers, 2) how well are they training employees to task-based capacity and job mastery. How else would an employer be able to make informed decisions on whether it makes sense to lay off more workers to make the quarterly report seem better by lowering labor costs. Or, to focus more attention on developing workers who can be more productive, more compliant, and have more capacity and value; to utilize the existing workers to their fullest before deciding to hire more workers or invest in expensive, perhaps unneeded, automation?

Without proper KPI metrics for worker development and task-based performance criteria, management usually resorts to the old standbys such as attendance, safety incidents, how well an employee gets along with others instead. Yet these may be measuring symptoms of how well an employee is acclimating to an informal, contradictory development environment. It is more important for an employer to ensure that each person has been correctly and completely trained first, so that the more general measures of employee engagement can be useful. KPIs and tools for SOJT worker development provide the system and data necessary to accomplish this.

It seems counterintuitive to expect supervisors to provide good management and leadership to workers that may have only been partially developed for their job classification. Being critical of a worker’s performance too many times when, in fact, that is the way they were/were not trained to perform the task can sour the worker’s morale and create other behavioral symptoms such as ambivalence, disengagement, and ultimately turnover. Once full job mastery is determined, management can use its skills to manage and drive higher performance and adapt to changing scenarios. Anything short of worker full job mastery has supervisors and managers “pushing on a string.” No one should be surprised by the lack of results.

Check out Proactive Technologies’ structured on-the-job training system approach to see how it might work at your firm, your family of facilities or your region. Contact a Proactive Technologies representative today to schedule a GoToMeeting videoconference briefing to your computer. This can be followed up with an onsite presentation for you and your colleagues. A 13-minute promo briefing is available at the Proactive Technologies website and provides an overview to get you started and to help you explain it to your staff. As always, onsite presentations are available as well.