Be Careful About What You Assume Employees Know!

TeamOJT Tip of the Month for January, 2004

The process of having teams of employees (who do the same job) conduct a simple job task analysis, including identifying prerequisite knowledge and skills, is critical to a company empowering its employees and gaining and maintaining a competitive stance. When employees don't know the basics and are not in an environment that encourages the kind of discussion and openness that occurs in the team context, they can end up with low self-esteem. Quality and productivity will suffer, and no amount of training in team building, statistical process control, or communication will make any difference.

In their book, Total Quality Management: Strategies and Techniques Proven at Today's Most Successful Companies, Stephen George and Arnold Weimerskirch wrote about two companies-both winners of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award-that assumed a level of knowledge among their employees that simply did not exist. Trying to lower the defect rate, one company purchased high-tech equipment and then trained their employees in statistical process control (SPC), neither of which effort solved the problem. Almost by accident, the company later discovered that employees lacked basic math and reading skills. The other company tried training all of its employees, from the executives to factory floor workers, in SPC, problem solving, goal setting, global competition, and cycle time. They too eventually discovered the same truth-that basic skills were missing.

In general, typical missing skills may include math skills, basic knowledge of retail merchandise, computer skills, locating information in catalogues, taking a customer's order, using a fax machine, and even operating a forklift!

A Midwest machine tool company, for example, did not realize that no one in the plant had ever been trained to operate the forklift that was used everyday. That discovery was made during a team's session, when it identified 38 additional tasks workers were expected to know before learning the tasks identified during the task breakdown. Most of those prerequisites were tasks for which no written procedures or instructions even existed. This is not an unusual example.

Be careful about what you assume! It's amazing how much basic information employees simply don't know.

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