The Connection Between Worker Capacity, Organizational Capacity and Output
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
The term “capacity” has many meanings. The business dictionary defines capacity for different applications, but generally defines it as “specific ability of an entity (person or organization) or resource, measured in quantity and level of quality, over an extended period.” What is often missed is that each application measured for capacity is made up of important contributors that, too, have capacity.
For example, the capacity of a company can be stated as the output measured quarterly or annually, but attempts to improve it without considering the make-up of the people, the equipment, the leadership, the strategy and resources would be difficult. The output would be affected by: 1) the availability of resources; 2) the level of staffing; 3) the quality of the staffing; 4) the output attainable by the equipment in use; 4) the allocation of all resources; and many more factors. The level of improvement for overall company capacity possible is reliant on the level of control of the inputs in use.
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Thinking of a company as being made up of building blocks helps to visual this relationship. Fundamental to it all is the worker, and worker capacity. Worker capacity fits the definition above, but seldom do companies have a definition and control of a worker’s capacity. More often than not, companies view a workers contribution as placeholder for a position defined in terms of hours worked, dollars spent or an expected output based on the history of predecessors.
But worker capacity is much more than that. It relates to the range of tasks the worker is expected to masterfully perform, on equipment and using tools provided, meeting all standards and specifications, and in a safe and risk-adverse manner. It is affected by internal factors such as the company’s strategy, policies, management technique, working environment, company culture and perception of fair compensation. It can be affected, as well, by the worker’s external influences such as well-being, well-being of family members, health, finances and any number of unexpected disruptors. Read More
Are Advances in Technology Distracting Keeping HR From the Fundamentals of Worker Selection and Development?
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Billions of investment dollars are driving the advancements in technology into every corner of our lives, including the selection and development of workers. Predictably, the emphasis often seems more on the technology and the money it can make for investors than the practicality for the end-user or those it effects.
It is not just the refrigerators that talk to your grocery store, or watches that talk to the phone in your pocket. Wall Street, with an accumulating mountain of cash, can drive any idea to fabricate a “trend” that often dissipates as quickly as it emerges, sometimes leaving disruption in the wake but yields a return for investors. For investors it is the means to an end. To many, it may negatively affect their life and their future.
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In the 1990’s, investors started to look at the National Security Agency’s and Central Intelligence Agency’s “key-word search” capabilities used to scan millions of documents from around the world for specific words and phrases to expand their intelligence gathering reach. They saw applications of this technology in the civilian world, including scanning the mounds of resumes and employment applications employers had to filter in order to find a few new-hires. On the surface, this seemed to be a godsend.
Soon employers and employment candidates saw what the developers of this technology did not. The technology first had to count on employers having accurately designed job descriptions in consistent formats, using standardized terms, words and phrases to describe pre-hire knowledge, experience, skills and abilities of interest. The fact was reality couldn’t have been farther from this, with job descriptions written 50 years prior, written precisely for someone the employer wanted to hire (not so reflective of the actual job requirements), or cut & pasted from a handy library resource.
Next, this technology had to rely the applicant knowing the right words and phrases to describe their own pre-hire knowledge, experience, skills and abilities of interest to the employer for the algorithm to recognize a closeness or match. In truth, most candidates even knew less about the difference between a skill and ability, knowledge and a trait, having “experience with” versus being “acquainted with,” or being “fluent” in a topic or having a passing knowledge.
Nevertheless, this technology, with all of its short-comings, stormed the market. Many who lost their jobs in 2008 had not written a resume or filled in a job application for 20 or 30 years, let alone were aware of how key-word search worked and the need to be precise in describing a life of work in terms used by employers which were evolving and who probably changed their own management line-up and company strategy. No one really knows how many highly skilled and perfect matches have seen their careers derailed by this technology, robbing the worker of the job they wanted and the employer of the worker they needed. Read More
The Key To Effective Maintenance Training: The Right Blend of Structured On-The-Job Training and Related Technical Instruction
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 a lot of my career as Dean of Corporate and Continuing Education at community and technical colleges, in several states. Where we could, we tried hard to provide the best core skills development delivery for technical job classifications the employers in our community requested. We often did this working off the limited, and often suspect, job information the employer could provide to us.
Often we were up against budgetary constraints that limited our efforts to customize programs and keep the programs up to date when the instructor was willing to maintain the relevance of the program. If that wasn’t enough, school leadership often showed ambivalence toward adult and career education due in part to the fact that its demand was driven by gyrations in the economy. Furthermore, the institution was built upon, more familiar with and understood better credit courses for the more stable subjects such as math, science, literature, history and the social sciences.
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We tried a lot of innovative programs for employers in the community within the constraints mentioned, but if I was to be honest we rarely kept up. What we thought we knew of the targeted job classifications and their requirements, and upon which our programs were built and measured, seemed to become increasingly misaligned within just a few years. Not only was advancing technology putting pressure on the content of our learning materials and program design – a constant push toward obsolescence – the employers were continually rethinking the design of their job classifications to meet their business goals and budgets. We were finding less and less similarity in job classifications between employers, by job title and job content.
Inevitably, and not from lack of effort or desire, it was difficult to keep technical curriculum current to within 5-10 years. The “Maintenance” job classification was a perfect example and could be incredibly different from company to company. In the early days, Maintenance was thought of as multi-craft; a maintenance person was responsible for maintaining all aspects of the operation. Some companies tried to hold onto that concept of Multi-Craft Maintenance but, as Multi-Craft Maintenance Technicians were becoming harder to find and therefore required higher pay, more and more companies began to deviate from multi-craft to specialty and single-craft positions that cover only limited areas such as facilities, electrical or mechanical. Some Maintenance positions did not include HVAC, some were primarily focused on servicing machines but not repair. Some employers subcontracted out facility maintenance and instead had their Maintenance employees perform preventative maintenance tasks on everything from manual machines to PLC driven multi-axis machines, to robots and robotic manufacturing machines – leaving the servicing to the warranty and/or contracted OEM experts. Trying to find the right balance between an effective Maintenance program that gives every employer what they wanted but does not train for skills that one might never have a chance to use and master and most likely would forget, proved increasingly difficult to say the least.
This dilemma for program and instructional design, I believe, is worse today. Read More
Enterprise Expansion/Contraction and Worker Development Standardization
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
One challenge faced when expanding, contracting or acquiring an enterprise is adjusting the scale of the workforce development strategy(ies) that already exist(s) to the increase/decrease in the number of workers while maintaining a consistent ratio of output, quality yield, safe performance and process compliance. Contrary to an accountant’s perspective on staffing level adjustment, there should be serious consideration given to the range and depth of each worker’s acquired skills; an “inventory” of each employee prior to the official act of expanding or contracting. We take a physical inventory of product, equipment, parts, etc. to assess value, so why would we treat a human asset any different?
Obviously an expansion strategy is different than a contraction strategy, but when it comes to determining the value of a worker it is similar for both strategies. How an organization addresses the development, measurement and maintenance of that value may differ widely. Let’s look at both scenarios.
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For companies expanding, if a sound structured on-the-job training infrastructure is in place it is simply a matter of scaling. More work means more employees that have to be trained before adding value to the operation. Sometimes expansion includes a segway from straight-line scaling, such as new products and services requiring new equipment, which in turns requires new/improved core skills before structured, task-based on-the-job training can be implemented to build upon incumbent worker skill sets. A solid structured on-the-job training infrastructure can easily adapt to new work, new tasks, new technologies and new trainees.
For companies contracting, one would think this would just be scaling but in a negative direction. It usually ends up more complicated than that when work for three different areas are consolidated on top of the work performed by the workers in the fourth area. If left alone this will produce an obvious bottleneck to say the least. With consolidation of the jobs, and therefore the consolidation of the tasks required of workers in each, intuitively it would stand that recipients of these tasks should be trained on the best practice of these new processes and necessary compliance. Otherwise contraction of an enterprise will continue as overall capacity dwindles and decreasing output results.
In a third scenario, when a company acquires another site or other sites, the acquiring enterprise usually brings in an expert who can unify HR and HRD strategies and already knows how to analyze what is needed. An effective expert will make sure inventories are taken at each site to formulate a strategy on how to consolidate differing systems and policies into one unified system – hopefully flexible enough to accommodate the uniqueness of each site. The process flow follows a logical track:
- Inventory of human resources enterprise software (if existent): Decisions usually have to be made as to which system will become the standard, what data has been kept and should be kept, how to convert the data to the standard format, training of each site’s staff on the new system, etc. Read More
Read the full September, 2020 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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