Have you ever worked a job and you were given little or no training, expected to perform at a high level, and when you make a mistake you are reprimanded. I've been on both sides of this situation and I can tell you that you that it will demoralize your employees very quickly. I my work with a veterinary clinic sometimes what's missing is the basic blocking and tackling. I'm training the manager on how to be a Lean manager and we are currently working on standard work. One of the questions I had were what is the standard way to check in and check out a client. The manager had one response and the three other people at the reception desk has 3 other responses. This surprised manager but didn't shock her. She knew that they made mistakes and the inconsistencies were not out of the blue. I asked how do you train the people. "They've all been here for over 4 months to over a year and should know the process by now."
I challenged her to run through some dry run scenarios with the folks. During a slow time walk-through examples by pretending you are a client and see what they do and them correct them as you go. Initially she was she thought it was a waste of time but after the first walk-through she was absolutely shocked on all the errors and mistakes they were making.
At this point we then had the conversation about how the lack of training is de-motivating her staff and causing customer service issues. This is an easy fix of training a little bit at a time every day. It only takes 60 minutes at fist and as they learn and get faster the training session will be as short at 10 min a day. The important thing to remember is that you are always training.
As a result the manager went from spending 1.5 hours a day in rework for miss entered information in the computer to less than 30 minutes in just 1 week of training. The goal is to be down to zero by the end of the month.
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3 comments:
Great points, and thanks for sharing.
In the context of training, the other things that can demotivate people is conducting training without setting the context of purpose or setting expectations. So if we don't understand the why, then it's just stuff that we're being trained on. And if we aren't clear on what's expected in terms of application, then it runs the risk of wasted time.
So put some muscle behind the training you do conduct.
Jamie Flinchbaugh
www.jamieflinchbaugh.com
Jamie,
Good comments. I'm remind of Nietzsche who said with a sufficient why a person can do any how. The why is the motivating factor with training. Great input!
Ankit
Ankit, your lead in picture got me thinking about past "conditioning" in the services, so good sticky prompt.
I had similiar experience today as you describe above & found following analogy useful in working with the manager to understand the need\break in training process.
Think of preparing children for school i.e. pre-school. Parents helping build readings skills with good intention but lack of structure. Useful to get a feel & build some enthusiasm but needs to followed by structured learning process led by a teacher who has experienced what is being done & knows what the bigger picture is (Jamie's context). We often miss this next stage of evolution, either relying upon the unstructured process to morph into a knowledgeable & capable person or try to jump to university courses without appropriate prep for this too.
Thanks for the mind prod.
Mike
P.S. Enjoyed "vet tales" with Karl on LeanNation :-)
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