Is It Possible To Improve Worker Performance Without Documented Task Mastery?

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

W. Edwards Deming said, “We are being ruined by the best efforts of people who are doing the wrong thing.”  The inefficiencies, discrepancies, affects on morale and potential for adverse incidents would seem to make preventing this a priority. To make improvements given this condition seems to be, at most times, futile.

Often we are lulled into believing this phenomena doesn’t exist when products get produced and shipped, and services are provided. That is where the metrics are pointed – output. But how much is known about the effort, sometime struggle, to get there? Was the effort efficient, accurate and consistent? If we do not have definitive answers to these questions, how to improve performance will likely be as illusive and resources used in the attempt a waste.

For many organizations, the only way to know the road was bumpy is through negative events; product scrap or rework, lost customers, operator injury or an outcome requiring legal intervention. Perhaps the oversight has been lacking due to a lean or “green” supervisory staff, or a lack of budget for the extra hours or equipment needed to monitor the process, or processes are unsettled and changing rapidly without those individuals performing them being immediately notified.

For any reason, relying on a negative event to prompt scrutiny can be very costly – much more than the investment needed to prevent this. Worse yet, an investigation too narrowly focused resulting in remedies that overlook the obvious reasons for the discrepancy may inject new uncontrolled variables. Many remedies become more disciplinary (e.g. reprimanding or firing the person(s) thought responsible, a complete audit involving all departments and staff, reassigning the process to another department, or delegating the process to one person who knows how to get around the systemic errors and barriers to produce the output expected…until that one person moves to another job or company and that “wisdom” is lost).

To determine to what degree this is an issue with your operation, you need only:

1)  Pick a random, but consequential, task of a job classification
2)  Ask around who is/are the resident expert(s)
      – If you get different answers, ask further, “how do you know?”
      – Is there any documentation that proves it or are memories the only record of task mastery?
3)  From that answer, ask yourself how would you go about improving task performance of any one assigned the task?
4)  Ask yourself, how would you go about managing that level of performance through continual change?
5)  Now project this result in your mind to all tasks, of all job classifications, for every employee.
      – Do you feel worker development is a controlled or uncontrolled process?
      – Can you imagine if the business operation is losing out through undeveloped or under-developed worker capacity?
      – Can you devise a adequate solution to improve this situation?

This is one of the main reasons continuous improvement efforts fail – no one has developed standard, best practice processes to see how far that leads before attempts to tinker with parts of it. Some organizations may have taken a stab at written processes of a few of the critical tasks – perhaps to position themselves for ISO, AS or IATF quality program certification. Sometimes though this reflects more a cosmetic approach than practical, with 2 or 3 steps summarizing the lengthy process that lead to more confusion and conflict than clarity. Some have detailed processes for a few tasks, but not all of the tasks that make up a job classification; helpful but incomplete. To assume a new worker with no background in the tasks or skills a job requires can acquire them by osmosis is decision that will come back to haunt one day.

The best established written processes are clear, succinct and complete enough that anyone following them verbatim would get the same result…every time. That is known as “repeatability.” Readability refers to the process being written at the level of the expected user group (e.g. no unnecessary challenging words higher than the expected reader’s level, no ambiguous words and statements such as “occasionally,” “periodically,” “after a brief period,” and no sentences written that can be read different ways).

The effort to create processes where they do not exist, and/or make consistent and accurate processes that already exist, is not as daunting and needing a seemingly large investment as one might think. If done right, a thorough methodology would collect and formalize all details about task performance in one pass through observing a resident expert and taking the role of a “new-hire” learning for the first time. With software like Proactive Technologies uses for its clients, all of the tools necessary to establish (or support if already established) and maintain (through change) standard written processes, synchronized structured on-the-job training and certification materials, job descriptions, and much more while keeping track of new-hire and incumbent worker’s drive from task mastery through full task mastery. The PROTECH© system of managed human resource development facilitates continual improvement of both the worker and the processes!

Without eliminating the obvious first – whether everyone is clear on how the process needs to be performed for best quality, efficiency and safety – improvement efforts often throw new variables into an already variable procedure to hurt more than help. Then continuous improvement efforts themselves will be blamed, rightly or wrongly.

Fortunately, no one would take a person whose only familiarity with airplanes is riding in them, put them in the pilot seat and then try to improve performance. There is no way to isolate which core skills are weak or if task performance is to blame if the plane crashes. No one would expect a graduating medical student to be ready for surgery without clearly understanding the known best practices and demonstrating they can comply with them. That is why task-based training is very specific and certification of “job mastery” a requirement.

Practicing the best practices in the real-world setting may spawn ideas for innovation and improvement, which need to be tested against the originally accepted best practice for being better. Trying to improve performance with advanced technology without assuring the worker understands and can perform the underlying process could be a waste of resources and lead to more problems that need to be addressed. Without a baseline, any effort to improve performance is futile and would be like the game “whack-a-mole.”

Continuous improvement efforts can be a waste of resources and inject new problems if conducted “cart before the horse.” Knowing what the standard best practices are for each critical task of a job, ensuring each worker on each shift is  properly trained to perform each task to mastery, and maintaining a systems approach to worker development will facilitate improvement and ensure it takes hold quickly and completely. Creating and managing an infrastructure to support this is easier to build and takes less of an investment that often thought. 

If you would like to know how Proactive Technologies’ structured on-the-job training system approach might help your firm standardize best practices and drive high performance, 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.