By Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Let’s face it, discussing the desperate need for worker training to build consistent performance, increased worker output and compliance, is a hard sell in any boardroom. The first question is usually, “how much is this going to cost us?” Not “what is the investment and how will we realize the return?” Since accountants, who are not trained in any aspect of worker development, have more weight in this type of showdown, guess who wins.
Shareholder gains are measured in terms of quarterly profit margins; try explaining the merits of building a stronger, more resilient and retained workforce and the value of increasing worker capacity, increasing work quantity, quality and compliance over yawns and disinterest. It usually takes decades of unintentional or intentional neglect to weaken a firm’s workforce; it stands to reason the solution won’t bring exciting monetary returns in a quarter.
There is plenty of shared blame for this state of disconnect. Human resource professionals, training and development experts, and education in general have focused their workforce development solutions promotion on products they have – the quick and simple classroom and online products. It makes sense. That is the domain they are strongest. These products are great for pre-employment core skill development and post-hire core and general technical skill (if properly aligned), but these represent transfer of knowledge, not transfer of task-based expertise.
It is hard to draw a line from completion of a knowledge transfer course to improvements in a worker’s performance. Sometimes it is due to the lack of fit with the actual need, sometimes to relevancy of the content. And courses just happened to be priced in “seat time” units, which fits an accountants “cost” definition well. As easy as it is to list cost in a budget, it is just as easy to delete it from the budget.
In an interesting article in IndustryWeek Magazine entitled, ‘Where Are the Big Wins?’ How I Got Fired as a Lean Consultant,” authors Rick Bohan, Ron Jacques described their experience with this dilemma as this:
“Too many senior leaders don’t want to reflect on their own behaviors, and how those behaviors hurt the organization.
Just the other day, I (Rick) got fired six months into a lean consulting initiative that was to have lasted two years. During those six months, I (along with a number of energetic operators and engineers) started several relevant projects.
- Workplace organization and visual factory throughout the plant
- Development of run sheets and changeover checklists
- Reduction of unplanned downtime
- Organization of the Work in Progress staging area to facilitate “first in, first out” pull scheduling
You might think that this was an aggressive schedule, or you might think that it was a light schedule … but it’s not nothing, right?”
The authors were fired and the project disbanded because the CEO had not seen the “big win” dollar amount that would please the board of directors. In lieu of that, this probably opened the project up to criticism from those waiting to make themselves known to management by piling on; that the lean project looked to be distracting everyone from their immediate contribution to the quarterly numbers and it, therefore, naturally appeared to the CFO as a cost that should be eliminated to maintain the obligatory quarterly earnings.
With structured on-the-job training, this hurdle applies as well. Even though a good SOJT program is designed using the employer’s start subject matter experts and a consensus is developed that the best practices for all of the critical tasks for a job classification are identified and materials and reports are available to make sure each worker, as well as incumbents, are driven to “full job mastery,” employers will not see “big wins” overnight or even quarterly that will please the board if that is all they are looking for. However, an employer that initiates a proper SOJT strategy will see early signs of the strategy having an impact if they are watchful:
- Changing employee engagement (with coworkers and manager) and morale
- Decreased employee turnover
- Employee’s renewed focus on self-improvement
- Increasing worker productivity (if the employer has a measure)
- Increasing worker capacity (reported monthly)
- Increasing departmental capacity (reported monthly)
- Increasing awareness and compliance with quality and safety requirements
- A “quieting” of internal worker-management tensions that might have hindered the firms progress before
- Decreasing need to hire before determining if undeveloped capacity exists
Granted, no one has really come up with solid GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices) measures to put a dollar value to any one of these areas of worker and organizational improvement, but some things that can be seen and felt can be estimated. For example, if a company buys a million-dollar piece of machinery that should increase output by 100%, wouldn’t it make sense to properly train the operators to make it run at that level? We know management would be disappointed if the best they could get out of the new machine is 50% but without a doubt it is available; why doesn’t that same logic apply to each worker hired?
Turning an employer’s culture of worker development and worker maintenance neglect cannot be done overnight, but the act of turning can bring about near immediate, tangible results that should please any rational thinker. Not being able to calculate “cost savings” and “return on worker investment” (although evident) because your firm has never developed objective measures for them shouldn’t stop the from deciding to set off on a path to build a workforce for continued growth and sustained excellence. You might have to educate your board a little more, but it is worth it on many levels. Maximizing each worker’s capacity through job mastery maximizes shareholder value, too.
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.
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