Preparing for the New Workforce Reality

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

My experience in helping employers with their worker development programs for decades has led me to make a generalization that I believe to be true. Many employers have very little idea of how much capacity and value each worker contributes to their organization’s operation. For companies that make critical cost-benefit decisions daily, when it comes to harnessing worker value, what may seem to them as “penny-wise,” more often winds up being “pound-foolish.”

In these organizations you might find poorly written, or no longer job-relevant, job descriptions that shed light on how little is known about each job classification for which they are trying to find new-hires that have the right core skill base. Scratch a little deeper and you might find little in the way of a training strategy or infrastructure to identify and close any gap. Analyze the sum of your findings and you might conclude that this weakness makes it difficult, nearly impossible, to measure and improve individual worker performance – something that, when asked, each employer continues to dream of, but believes they are forced to forego.

A well-run company might know how many parts an investment in equipment should be able to produce down to the hour or minute. When it comes to the employees that run the equipment, employers admit to knowing very little. They have sketchy, if any, data as to which tasks the employee can perform expertly, which tasks they cannot and which tasks no one ever bothered to train them on. Employers talk about their “investment in their workforce” without fully realizing the importance of that statement.

There are many reasons for this. It was easy for employers to look the other way when business was good and output was generating the returns they expected. Short-term upper management strategies facilitate a myopia by focusing on the bottom line, and not so much on how it was reached or how it can be maintained.

When it comes to staffing, job descriptions, in many cases, are photocopies of a template that somebody created for a job that the writer thought they were familiar with. Because the job title was similar, and the requirements innocuous, it seemed to be “close enough.”

In a response to this, a few years ago some academics and human resource organizations began a movement encouraging employers to free themselves of the shackles of job descriptions, seemingly embracing the illogic represented by Lewis Carroll’s quote from his book Alice in Wonderland, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”  They saw the answer as not fixing the inadequacies of the job descriptions, but in throwing them out and rolling the dice.

Before that, the lack of understanding of the importance of employer-based deliberate, structured and documented worker training led to decades of insistence by educational institutions that the sole answer lied in assessments built to prescribe pre-determined products, or in outdated and job-irrelevant skill standards – further confusing employers and disappointing them with the results.

When the theories of so-called experts lose their credibility in practice, individual employers strike out on their own search for solutions or toward avoidance of the issues plaguing them out of an acceptance that there must not be a solution or it would have become institutionalized already. Employers, in general, mostly have a “herd mentality.” There is safety in numbers. When the herd grows large enough they will follow – sometimes even if, unintentionally, in the wrong direction.

Some employers have been led to the mistaken notion that as long as parts are being shipped or services are being provided for now, the company’s worker training program must we effective…the short-comings of which are revealed when a costly major fail of product or service quality occurs, someone is hurt or equipment is destroyed. This usually triggers and investigation that reveals the unintentional neglect that has been waiting for its turn to be seen.

Without an empirical reason to think otherwise, over the last decades corporations have tended to minimize the importance of the human resources function, trading seasoned HR Managers (usually higher paid) for “HR Generalists” who work for less and whose areas of responsibility are usually limited to hiring, firing and benefits. Graduate programs in human resource management, the courses of which in the past gave little attention to worker training but emphasized worker learning and assessment, eventually eliminated the topics seeing no market for the skills if HR generalists were not going to be allowed to practice them.  Those corporations that had an established Training and Development department often downplayed the significance, since informal, unstructured haphazard and inconsistently delivered one-on-one training seemed to get the job done…until the company encounters a period of expansion and their only experts are tied up with informal on-the-job training and not production, or the only capable person relied upon to train others retires or separates from the company.

When there are no metrics or measures in place to collect worker value data, the default measure becomes an event – usually negative – that draws management’s attention and concern. Often during a post-mortem the obvious fact that the employee wasn’t trained or trained properly is discovered but dismissed since no internal infrastructure to deliberately train workers exist anyway. Solutions in these cases turns to employee discipline or costly changes to the equipment or the work area, but the underlying problem remains to be revealed yet again.

The real employer challenge begins with a deficit, a gap, between the tasks that their job requires the employee to perform versus a generic list of items in a job description which might have come as a template, that puts the employer at an automatic disadvantage. Selecting an employee without adequate targeting information (nor a deliberate training strategy to remedy the deficiency) sets new-hires on paths to failure at worst, marginal performance at best. As technology changes, the employer’s product and service line change, the gap grows larger. The simple consensus solution has been to hire one more worker without knowing if current employees have unused capacity that could be developed, and in putting the new-hire on the same fraught-ridden development path as everyone before them.

If all of this wasn’t enough of a challenge, the recent Covid-19 pandemic was like the player who didn’t like how the chess game was going, so he tossed the entire table. Older workers, it appears, are deciding it is finally time to go back to retirement. Those able to retire early decided to do so. This drained the expertise from many operations at a time younger workers were critically reassessing the wage rates, benefits, working conditions and work schedules, remembering the torment their parents went through, and deciding to pass on openings while the market favors the worker.

This exasperated an already tricky situation for employers; not just U.S. based employers but employers around the globe. Turnover rates swelled. Not having a training infrastructure in place to have captured the expertise of experts leaving the operation in order to rapidly and completely transfer it to new-hires keeps the employer at a disadvantage and stifles not only a return to stability but challenges opportunities to growth. Furthermore, not having a clear path to higher wages and promotion via gaining and documenting job-relevant task-based skills leaves younger workers to wonder if the opportunity is there or are they signing up for a low-wage, long-hours job they saw their parents struggle with.

Just as the Covid-19 disruption caused employers to reconsider their supply chain strategies, employers are finding the need to critically examine their worker recruitment, selection, onboarding, training, evaluation and promotion strategies to remain competitive for attracting skilled workers and in retaining them. If the Crash of 2008 was a wake-up call, the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic should be a loud “I told you so.”

When Proactive Technologies, Inc. is contracted by employers to set-up and support structured on-the-job training programs, the next step after a thorough job/task analysis of the existing job classification is taking an inventory of the incumbent worker’s tasks they have mastered against the set of tasks required. This is constructed with the help of the current subject matter expert’s. Invariably, the starting point for training the incumbent workers to close the gap might be at the 20 to 40% average range for job mastery. This means that the employer is lacking capacity for that worker by around 60 to 80% while paying the prevailing wage. Multiply that deficit by the number of employees in that job classification and it is clear that the employer is paying much more than the value the workers would reflect. The solution lies not in eliminating a number of workers to cut costs, but to quickly develop unused capacity to realize higher worker capacity and, therefore, value, higher levels of work quality, work quantity and compliance. The Proactive Technologies, Inc. provides the tools to quickly close the gaps of incumbent workers while driving them, along with new-hires, to full job mastery.

During the Covid pandemic, employers, without a structured on-the-job training infrastructure, raced to pay workers more to retain them without a strategy to develop the unused capacity to offset the increase in labor costs. It is yet to be seen if these wage increases are sustainable.

We will see if lessons learned after the Crash of 2008, when some of the most trained, technically competent and experienced workers had to be laid off to never return, were remembered. As with the Covid pandemic, in 2008-09 a lot of seasoned subject matter expert‘s who either postponed retirement or returned from retirement because retirement savings was not enough to sustain them were indiscriminately let go with the others.  Having captured that expertise (before it leaves) for future expertise transfer, and having and implementing a structured on-the-job training program, is critical for not only maintaining a company’s operational capacity, but to allowing them to expand to other market opportunities as well. More importantly, capturing expertise and structuring it for training makes it easier for employers to adapt to, and rebound from, sudden changing economic conditions.

It is not difficult to set up a structured on the job training program, and many states have grant programs that will help defray the employer’s investment for setting-up and implementing a structured on-the-job training program – especially if registered as apprenticeships as many of the ones Proactive Technologies has set-up have been. Still, many employers who can conceive of the important impact it could have are reluctant to make the decision, relying on past practices that did not serve them well in most cases.

Raising each worker’s capacity even 30 to 40% improves the employer’s overall capacity, quantity and quality, and compliance with processes and regulations. It offers a “return on worker investment” that the corporation’s accountants and upper management can see and understand. Metrics are available to measure, track and improve each worker’s development toward full job mastery. Compensation and incentive strategies can be built around not just how long you have been with the company, but also by what percentage of the job you have mastered.

In many cases it precludes the need to hire a new worker for hiring’s sake. Decisions to navigate a changing and challenging world can be made more strategically, knowing that each worker can be put on a path towards full job mastery with a structured on-the-job training program in place – even if the job is changing. The reality of the need for a shift in worker development strategies has been growing in slow motion for decades; the Crash of 2008 and the current pandemic are reminders that employers better hurry things up.

Proactive Technologies’ helps employers build and implement a structured on-the-job training system approach, specifically for their jobs and business strategy, to drive each worker’s accelerated path toward full job mastery. 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. 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, skipping the online presentation and scheduling an onsite presentation is an option.