Thinking Holistically About Worker Development

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Every potential worker and incumbent worker possess enormous value, waiting to be first developed then realized. Too often the opportunity is lost at development, and the value remains untapped or marginally realized. Lack of effort, or lack of relevant effort, yields lackluster results.

When an artist approaches a canvas, they see a blank surface waiting only for their effort to turn it into a work of art. They work to utilize every bit of white space to bring out its potential contribution to the overall vision. They, too, are applying developed expertise in the performance of work. If they’re in it for money, they know that an unfinished painting or drawing minimizes the return on the resources utilized. Yet they’re not disappointed with a unfinished piece and do not blame others if they, themself, don’t put in the effort, they continue until they are satisfied that they have done all they can and the piece matches their expectations.

Each potential worker is like a blank canvas. Educators know that it is their responsibility to bring out the best of each student that passes through their classroom. They know that if they fail to present to potential workers new and relevant skills needed for continued educational growth, and/or current opportunities in society, they have produced an unfinished work of art with limited value and future potential.

When that potential worker reaches the doorstep of the opportunity an employer provides, not only does the employer need to remediate the core and general skill deficiencies that might exist, they need to continue the development of work-based core and general skills as well as task-specific skills for which the potential worker was recruited. If not, the unfinished canvas that managed to leave the educational process merely receives a touchup yet remains unfinished. As with the artist, the employer should not be disappointed in the worker if they do not put in the effort to develop it, nor should they blame others. The opportunity to do so was there, although most likely dissipated due to inaction or in adequate action – often because the remaining “resident experts” are busy keeping up with production with little time (perhaps little interest) to take a trainee under their wing – especially with no structure, definition or metrics to what is to be trained.

Assuming these workers are retained, an employer can amass a stable of workers (50, 100, 500, 10,000 employees) with yet to be developed potential. Employers might scratch their head and wonder why the company suffers from poor quality of product or service, inability to reach its production targets, inability to accommodate growth opportunities when they arise, and turnover; a low return on worker investment. They may soon find themselves staffed with a lot of disgruntled workers viewing this outcome from their different angles: few opportunities to establish themselves and demonstrate their value to the company, dismay over lack of opportunities for personal growth within the company or fear of dismissal for too many visible mistakes that could have been prevented by receiving proper training the first time, not finding out they self-taught themselves wrong by mistake.

The amount of resource waste that the symptoms of inadequate training reveal can be staggering! Logic leads one to the conclusion that if 1 employee is trained properly on only 30-40% of the tasks required of the job, 60-70% of the employee’s capacity is not developed for use yet the employer continues to pay full wage. Multiply this by the number of employees and number of years this was allowed to continue and you get the picture of tremendous loss of financial resources, value and return, but the opportunity cost is even greater.

Sometimes employers, when they recognize there is a problem, sooth concerns by going with the familiar and implementing contemporary approaches to operation optimization, such as lean, Kaisen, 6-S, process improvement – all change the nature of the work and compound the underlying issue of inadequate training, cross-training and skill-upgrading. They might even invoke the old tactics to provoke better worker performance such as worker motivation, wage and benefit increases and incentives, job consolidation for better efficiencies which may not yield much since it is hard to extract higher worker performance if the requisite training to perform the work correctly and efficiently was skipped. But these are all initiatives that peer employers use, as well, when finding themselves confronted with similar symptoms and they might find comfort in that.

The fascinating thing is that while employers turning to seemingly “empirical Band-Aids“ to their underlying for the issues, for the moment, feel euphoric that the training issue is being addressed. The outcome most likely reveals no positive change for the training issue but may produce tangible benefits addressing collateral issues. So, it appears the training problem is solved…until the underlying symptoms surface again. Even when the employer sincerely analyzes known symptoms of the potential workforce development problem, utilizing tools such as Pareto’s 80–20 approach, rarely does worker training figure into the 20% grouping of inputs. It is overlooked as an area of potential improvement for which the other manufacturing systems are capturing empirical evidence of a problem in need of a remedy.

Employers, consequently, seem to fall into two main groups: the false believers and the deniers. The false believers believe that they’ve done everything they can to develop the workers, and it’s the workers that are not living up to their potential. All of them? Shareholders cry out for cutting costs and the CEO is forced into hasty short-term solutions. But the bigger question remains; if the employer fails to train the worker on what they want them to perform and how they want it performed, who will and what is the outcome if the answer is no one? If it weren’t for the few workers who seem to teach themselves when all else fails, correctly or incorrectly, products might not get shipped or services might not be provided.

The deniers know that their internal systems of training workers (and cross-training them when the workers inevitably change jobs or the job is changed from under them) is inadequate, but fail to take action to improve upon their approach deciding instead to put their full faith in informal, unstructured and undocumented task-based on-the-job training – when a trainer is available and production priorities allow time for the training to occur. This approach produced the lack-luster worker performance in the first place. Often this leads to willing or shareholder-forced circumvention of their duty to train; seeking out expensive automation solutions, or operation relocation to lower wage labor markets to quiet criticism – where the problems with worker development are more profound, but decision-makers feel they can accommodate the difference because they only see the worker as a “cost“ and not a value to be harvested. Lowered “labor cost” in this paradigm means increased profit in the short-term; others can worry about the long-term.

The bottom line is this. What you get out of an employee is proportional to the effort you put in. While trying to maximize every other capital investment in the firm’s operation, every employer should view each worker as a capital investment and valued asset that should be developed to a level of mastery of the job. Pay increases will be justified once empirical data produced by a structured on-the-job training program can accompany it. The decreased worker turnover, the increase in work quality, quantity, safe performance and quality compliance will be the icing on a well-baked cake.

If you recognize these challenges and have shed your fear of even looking for other solutions, 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 always, onsite presentations are available as well.