Balancing the Need to Raise Wages to be Competitive With Corresponding Worker Value
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
It is said employers are having a hard time finding workers. It may be due to some workers having time to think during the disruptions of the past few years and may be looking for jobs that are better aligned with their career goals. Some may still fear the status of the Covid-19 cases, and its variants, made confusing by the premature, incomplete and contradictory news reports. Some may want to return to work but are navigating the difficulties of child care and return to school policies that vary from district to district.
It appears employers have accepted that, for the short term at least and quite possibly the long-term, that they will need to reconsider their componsation structures if they are to attract the caliber of worker they need. Some feel that discussion is long overdue. Of course, raising wages and benefits is going to add to the cost of labor associated with production or services. If the shortage of supplies raising the costs of goods accelerate the reshoring of jobs to America, the competition for the best workers could get fierce.
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“There is a way to mitigate the inevitable rising labor costs with higher worker value, and higher worker ROI.”
For decades employers have been laxed in their need to develop the most productivity and work quality from their workforce. It became more a hunt for “bodies“ than for developing more skilled workers. Most employers like to think that their in-house programs for training workers, once hired, meets their needs, but scratching the surface in most cases proves that there is very little structure, no plan, there is no documentation, and no sense of purpose. For most employers, people are hired, they are paired up with one of the existing workers and, hopefully, the existing subject matter expert will transfer expertise to the new worker to a level that, one day, might be recognizable.
Some companies that are struggling with a lot of turnover, and/or a surge of growth, see many of these workers can get lost in the shuffle. Some continue to hire more “bodies” who then wait for someone to train them to do something. Workers that could have been star performers are let go because there is no structured way to measure the outcome of the training process to anyone’s satisfaction. Then again, many workers leave employers when they discover that there is no way to improve themselves in the job classification. Read More
Your “Resident Expert” May Not Be an Expert Trainer, But Easily Could Be
by Stacey Lett, Regional Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Just because a worker is informally recognized as a “star performer,” it doesn’t necessarily follow that they can be an effective trainer. Employers like to think it is as easy as that, but seldom does it turn out to be the case. However, with a little structure, some tools and a little guidance these resident experts can, and often do, become expert trainers.
If one thinks about how an expert is measured and recognized, it is usually by subjective, mostly anecdotal measures. The worker performs job-related tasks quickly, consistently and completely. This implies few mistakes, performance that is mostly within specifications and standards of performance, and no one can remember anything rejected or returned as scrap or rework.
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Thinking it through a little further, one might struggle to explain how the expert performer developed these traits. Someone showed them how to perform a task, and repetitive performance developed new, retained skills. They are now operating as a “robot” while performing a task, seldom thinking about the subtleties and nuances of each task (filed in memory long ago), which makes them fast, consistent workers – something the employer can notice an appreciate.
But if we ask “who trained this expert,” “how was he or she trained,” or “what specifications and standards were emphasized,” we come up empty. By just playing the role of a trainee, and allowing one of these experts to train you on a task, will reveal a lot as to what the new-hire or cross-trainee can expect. If we compare this expert’s task performance to other peer experts, we probably will notice slight differences in performance between them, which means workers that each trained may be trained differently on the same task. Sometimes these differences can be subtle and of no consequence, sometimes they become a point of contention, lead to confusion and/or unsafe and incorrect task performance.
Every work environment is less than ideal for learning. Production pressures, personality clashes, learning style and teaching style differences, and departmental boundary incursions do not make it easy for a trainer to train or a trainee to learn without structure and guidance. If any of our experts train the next wave of new-hires or cross-trainees without structure, tools and standards – the building blocks of “best practice” performance – some of the expertise might not transfer and the differences between them become more obvious with each wave. This can often lead to frustrating confrontation between shifts, with one shift declaring the other two shifts as incompetent. Read More
Large Scale Worker Training Projects are Possible for Small and Mid-size Employers
by Dr. Dave Just, formally Dean of Corporate and Continuing Education at Community Colleges in MA, OH, PA, SC. Currently President of K&D Consulting
I spent many years as Director of Corporate and Continuing Education at several community colleges in multiple states. I think back on those years before working with Proactive Technologies when employer engagement was very difficult to achieve, let alone retain. Often it was only possible to get the employer to agree to send a few people to classes, either on site or offsite, if grant money covered the cost. But the scope was limited and the results were often inconclusive.
In the mid-90s, I began to partner with Proactive Technologies on what they called “structured on-the-job training programs.” It seemed simple and intuitively I felt something the employer could relate to. Building a training program, and an infrastructure where there was none, that the employer could recognize and has the potential to yield results they can immediately realize seemed like a new concept, but one employers told me they wished for in nearly every meeting.
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When we began talking with employers and were able to get them to commit to setting up structured on-the-job training programs for one job, maybe two, as a pilot. Inevitably, employers saw the value and expanded the programs to include other jobs critical to their operation and opened the programs up to more employees for training and cross-training.
Many of these manufacturers in South Carolina took the same path and expanded to include other jobs and other employees. They found that it also help them with their compliance issues with ISO 9001:2015, TS 19649, and AS 9001 type of certification programs. These qualities certification programs had a provision that required process based training and documentation to support it and documentation that the employer was serious about the effort and make sure that the job information and employee information is current and accurate. All of these projects worries Lee supported by Proactive Technologies and it’s many ways of reporting this information. Read More
Training Workers in a Roller Coaster Economy
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Often an afterthought, the need for structured on-the-job training is just as critical during a time of contraction as during a time of expansion. During cutbacks in staffing, work is redistributed to remaining employees as workers with expertise are inadvertently let go. Sometimes more attention is paid to worker seniority and wage levels than the potential loss of the accumulated investment in worker expertise and related replacement costs as a result of hasty workforce reductions.
Unfortunately, selling the need for an investment in a training infrastructure can be a harder sell to management who might be reluctant to make the case for fear of being perceived as being too “spend-happy” rather than seen as appropriately proactive. However, if no consideration is given to such planning that fact will subsequently reveal itself later in the form of transition costs – lost capacity and decreased operational productivity.
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“How an organization prepares for change determines if they will survive it or succumb to it.”
It can be said that if the organization was running efficiently before a cutback, worker expertise must have helped since the numbers now show that output and yield have been reduced. If the organization was not running efficiently before the cutback, and cutting workers has little effect on output and yield, perhaps the reason was there was a lack of expertise in running operations. Either way, developing expertise and preserving it through adversity should be seen as worthy goals by any organization.
Many years ago, CEOs became concerned with “succession planning,” which was limited to only key managerial positions. As organizations made themselves leaner, the number of positions that should be considered for succession planning multiplied but often went unnoticed until a disruption in operations occurred – quickly exposing vulnerabilities and loss of organizational capacity. Read More
Read the full October, 2021 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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