Lack of Immediate “Big Win” Puts Improvements in Worker Development on Chopping Block…
For Short-Term Focused Management Cultures
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.
click here to expandIt 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 accountant’s“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: Read More
“Quiet Quiting” on a Collision Course with “Quiet Hiring;” How to Make Matters Worse.
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
“Quiet Quitting” and “Quiet Hiring” may be new names, but both phenomena have been around as long as there has been work to perform and someone hired to perform it. The media seems to believe they discovered the trends and named them, like explorers “discovered” new lands…that were inhabited. Like every other impending crisis named, there seems to be manufactured pressure to respond to it – spawning a wave of “expert” opinions that often overshoot the intended target and sometimes complicating matters further.
In an article, What to Do About Quiet Quitting: 3 Ways to Reframe the Narrative, the author comments, “You’ve seen the term splashed across headlines and igniting social media. It isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s coming into sharper focus – like a bullseye – as employees return to the office. Quiet quitting, or “quitting in place” or, simply, “disengagement,” is the latest viral catchphrase that reminds us of one single, inexorable truth: That the pandemic has left workplaces reimagined and workers forever changed. And it’s a wakeup call for employers.”
Disengagement is defined as “the action or process of withdrawing from involvement in a particular activity, situation, or group,” which can be hidden or overt. It can be a simple difference between a worker minimally doing their job to take home their pay and no more, to someone doing that and harboring growing resentment towards their manager, the company and/or their coworkers but lacking the skills and confidence to move on. If left unchecked, it can poison the work environment and, worse, may lead to workplace confrontations.
click here to expandWhile many employers lack the strategy, will or awareness to reengage demoralized workers, often employers exacerbate the situation by doubling down on the neglect or provoking an escalation. Years of not balancing the inputs of competitive performance by foregoing the development of tools and expertise to facilitate enhanced, sustained performance – coupled with simmering worker detachment – sometimes leads employers to accept advice that is more momentarily convenient rather than appropriate when results seem less than expected. Pushing unrealistic performance goals on a fragile organization only fans the simmer to a boil. Read More
Training Issue or Attitude Issue? Understanding the Difference
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
If you spend some time in the Human Resources Department office, you often witness a supervisor or manager trying to explain why the new-hire isn’t working out. “Why do you believe that?” asks the HR Manager. The supervisor thinks a moment and says, “He just doesn’t act like he wants to learn.” The issue seems to be attitudinal. The HR Manager doesn’t bother to ask for any empirical evidence since it usually doesn’t exist, so the decision is made to terminate the new-hire and start all over…again.
Some, more forward thinking, human resources departments concluded that assessing job prospects might reduce the amount of hiring turnover. It certainly does help do that if the job classification was properly analyzed and the assessment instruments were aligned to the data for “job relevance.” However, even with the best screening potentially good employees might be lost. Knowing how to recognize the difference between attitude and training-related issues may save good employees from being lost due to misdiagnosis.
Whether a challenge to learning or performance is attitudinal is not easy to determine. Attitudes fluctuate from day to day, throughout the day. They can be affected by personal issues such as health of the individual, health of a family member, financial issues, relationship difficulties at home and the work culture (e.g. relationship with coworkers, supervisor and company management). Rather than hastily concluding any issue of worker development is attitudinal, I find it easier to eliminate the obvious and more common influence on worker learning and development; whether proper training has been conducted. After all, employee insecurity caused by feeling expendable while a 90-day probationary period clock is ticking can, in itself, affect anyone’s attitude and personality. If proper training is not available or worker development is conducted in an unstructured, haphazard and inconsistent manner, this is a major contributor to worker attitudes toward the company, themselves and others in the workplace.
click here to expandAssuming that the offered wage and benefits are competitive, there are four essential considerations to the hiring and keeping the best workers; Read More
Confusion Over What Constitutes “Training” is Stumbling Block to Effective Worker Development Strategies
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
For the anyone searching for information to help them choose a worker development strategy, a web search of “on-the-job training methods” might produce thirty or forty informative, but confusing, charts. The search result is a mixture of domains, methods, philosophies – one seemingly in conflict with the other. A non-practitioner of workforce development strategies can gather from this search result alone why there is a perpetual state of confusion between even “experts,” marked by decades of employer and trainee disappointment in the lack of recognizable strategies and outcomes, which are often devoid of meaningful results.
Over the years, approaches and methods have evolved out of their ineffectiveness, many diverging from the basic principals of workforce development. Markets for products to address these approaches grew and well-funded marketing began to find unaware customers. The notion of “training” morphed into branded versions of “learning,” selected not so much on their basis in logic, but more on the lack of “smart” choices and how well the marketing effort worked.
“A great first step is to clearly differentiate between “learning” and “training.” The strategies, methods of delivery and outcomes for each are very different. Without such clarity, one might mistakenly invest heavily in a strategy to accomplish worker development objectives that, instead, uses up vital resources and scarce opportunity, and sours the organization’s attitude toward training for years to come.”
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The acceleration started around 40 years ago. Prior to that, job classifications did not change much and were relatively simple in structure. Then panic set in over the approaching “skills gaps,” as computers were introduced into every aspect of our lives. Fear of baby boomers nearing retirement, taking their technical expertise with them, added to the challenge. Solutions started to appear out of academia, based on the world they knew and not as much on the world they were trying to improve, as they would have liked to think.
Did these methods address the workforce development challenges of their time? In 2023, employers are still concerned with the “skills gap” phenomenon. Read More
Read the full March, 2023 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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