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Highly trained employee..
Unspectacular job performance..
What are we Doing Wrong?
The good news is you may not be doing anything wrong. In fact, everything you’re doing is probably right. So don’t stop what you’re doing!
So, if we’re doing everything right, why aren’t our employees performing better? We train them with the best techniques available, classroom instruction, Web-based modules, and even interactive self-paced instruction. They’re getting good scores on the exams at the end of the class. But they’re not doing the job to the level that we need.
Training your employees to perform the tasks that make up their jobs is very important. You wouldn’t hesitate to tell me that poorly-trained employees do not perform well in the workplace. So why don’t all of your well-trained employees perform with excellence?
As a life-long teacher and trainer, I struggled with this question for many years. And as a safety consultant for manufacturing, the first thing I would tell you after an injury is that your employee needed to be retrained. It was a simple answer for a quick fix! More training equals fewer injuries. Job done! Not only was that my magic pill, but it is universally accepted by my safety peers. So, what would you do if I gave you this advice?
Well, since you’re the “expert” we would probably comply with your recommendation. But pulling our employee off the line for training is going to leave us short-handed. Plus, he has already been through this training and he knows what to do and what not to do. In our opinion, this would be a waste of time.
Training your employees to perform the tasks that make up their jobs is very important. You wouldn’t hesitate to tell me that poorly-trained employees do not perform well in the workplace. So why don’t all of your well-trained employees perform with excellence?
As a life-long teacher and trainer, I struggled with this question for many years. And as a safety consultant for manufacturing, the first thing I would tell you after an injury is that your employee needed to be retrained. It was a simple answer for a quick fix! More training equals fewer injuries. Job done! Not only was that my magic pill, but it is universally accepted by my safety peers. So, what would you do if I gave you this advice?
It was about this time that my mentor, John Maxwell, made a statement that changed everything. He said, “If you find yourself in a group of people and it feels like you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” That’s it! I was in the wrong room!
I immediately went from being the smartest person in the room to being totally clueless. New information was coming at me from every direction and I felt totally overwhelmed but at the same time I was fascinated. For the first time in my life I didn’t care how dumb I looked, I was determined to learn all I could because I finally found the answer to that nagging question of why so many highly-trained employees produce unspectacular job performance. It wasn’t about what their organizations were doing but about what they were not doing.
I immediately went from being the smartest person in the room to being totally clueless. New information was coming at me from every direction and I felt totally overwhelmed but at the same time I was fascinated. For the first time in my life I didn’t care how dumb I looked, I was determined to learn all I could because I finally found the answer to that nagging question of why so many highly-trained employees produce unspectacular job performance. It wasn’t about what their organizations were doing but about what they were not doing.
After several years of study, I’m now ready to share what I’ve learned with manufacturing leaders around the globe. That’s why I created the Performance Evaluation Matrix (Matrix). Based on the work of Thomas Gilbert, affectionately known as the “father of human performance,” the Matrix is an adaptation of Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model that’s been the standard for many years. It includes five factors in addition to training that influence the performance of your employees and provides a simple tool to help you evaluate any employee or team in all six areas.
So, now you’re telling us that there are six factors? What are the other five and
where does training fit in?
Great question! Let me take each factor, based on its relative importance, and provide the details. I’ll warn you up front. Training is not at the top of the list.
