A study by ESI International, a management firm that specializes in staff development, recently established that, despite the billions of dollars companies spend annually on training in the United States, too little of what they pay for actually gets applied on the job. Common missteps include insufficient involvement on the part of management in how training melds with a company’s goals, the lack of a companywide strategy, and insufficient feedback mechanisms to determine whether training has been effective.
Although it can be tempting to dismiss this kind of talk as so much gobbledygook, the findings highlight common training failures: Insufficient planning compounded by underdeveloped appreciation of how giving employees access to knowledge and skills to do their jobs affects the bottom line. Another way to think about it, as Dr. Arnold Free, a specialist in simulator-based learning describes it, is that good training requires we think in three stages: planning, execution, and assessment. Or as Jon Goodney at John Deere puts it, good training requires “analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation.”
At the University of North Carolina, professor John Hildreth thinks we often miss the boat when it comes to planning because managers get ahead of themselves, thinking in terms of tasks, when they should be defining goals. In the case of simulator training for the heavy equipment industry, for example, Hildreth wonders whether we’re trying to teach operators the task of how to safely operate machines, or whether our goal is to have them effectively and efficient produce work. The fact is if an organization doesn’t set goals, there’s no way it can define the tasks employees need to accomplish to become proficient, assess if they made the grade, or plan how to help them do better.
This type of thinking requires moving from the general to the specific, defining cause-and-effect relationships as you go. It isn’t rocket science, but it does require discipline. Think of how you would describe your business. The experts call it defining your mission. For purposes of discussion, let’s say as a contractor it’s something like, “To make money in as competent and safe a way as possible.” But how will you accomplish this? Being productive would be one thing, so right away you’ve got yourself a goal. Next up is to identify the factors that affect this productivity you’re aiming for, which in the earth-moving business typically involve personnel, resources, and management. The next step is defining a set of objectives by which you propose to achieve your goal. Goals as well as objectives are typically interrelated, but at this stage they’re best considered one by one.
Personnel, for example. Suppose you establish that one objective toward achieving maximum productivity is to maintain a staff of well-trained, seasoned operators. Fair enough, but what are the strategies by which you intend to bring this about? One strategy might be to develop a relationship with a union training program or a technical school. Another might be to buy or rent a simulator. Or you might decide to throw caution to the wind and invest in technology, machine control perhaps, a reasonable step in the current industry environment.
Observe the logic by which this strategy materialized. You didn’t decide on machine control and then engaged in a flurry of brainstorming about the ways in which you expect it might influence productivity. At this stage at least, you are limiting your expectations to how you can utilize this technology to develop a cadre of well-trained operators. Simplistic yes, but your job right now is to stay organized. Acknowledge first that to make this strategy effective you will have provide some kind of training, then identify the tasks you need to accomplish to help operators gain the proficiency that’s basic to your productivity goals. This is where things can get dicey and training often falls apart.
Task one: draft a training document. Elaborate or simple isn’t as important, says Bob Huculak at Luna Training Technologies, as having a plan and sticking to it. “Develop a simple and basic statement of policies and procedures and follow them. OEMS make a great deal of information available. Use it and modify it to fit your situation.”
“Actually,” says Dave Stafford, technology representative for Caterpillar’s Connected Worksite, “training starts before you buy the system. You have to be clear on how you’re going to apply it. If you want to grade a road next to an existing curb, your operators would have to know how to use a sonic sensor and set it up, which requires one kind of training. If you want GPS on the machine to run grading for site prep, that’s a different kind of setup. An operator can be taught in five minutes how to switch a machine into automatic and let it run. But to learn the applications takes longer.”
“If you’re a company that’s never run automatics” says Dave Hilbig, sales manager and trainer at Topcon’s dealership in Tustin, CA, “but you’ve got this job that requires very high tolerances, and you figure the way to do it is to run our Millimeter GPS on your grader; that’s way too much of a quantum leap. We’ve seen it happen. The operator in this case was so stressed he wasn’t willing to work through the little tweaking here and there needed to make the system work-to take a step back so that he could take three steps forward. Automatic laser systems on graders have been around for 20 years. If an operator’s running that, it’s a very easy transition to go into GPS. If he’s never run that system-putting him on GPS, he’ll be lost.”
Which means you have to be clear about who you’re training. “I can show someone how to navigate through the control box and what the system will and won’t do,” says Hilbig, “but I can’t operate a grader and cut beautiful grade. You still have to understand how to run the equipment and how to manage the material you’re pushing around. And anybody can sabotage anything. The operator or operators you’re depending on have to be ready to learn and they have to want to work to get proficient in the technology.”
Task number three: establish a realistic timeframe. “Caterpillar’s protocol is to train the operator in stages,” says Stafford. “We start with some very basic, simple operations and then come back in a week or two, after the operator has had a chance to practice, and teach him the next step and the next application. The way our system is designed, you can set up a very simple display in the beginning and add information as the complexity increases along with the number of tasks the operator becomes familiar with.”
Train enough people. “I want the operator, the grade checker, the foreman, even the mechanic if he’s available, to learn at the same time,” says Tony Vanneman at Topcon. “That way everybody’s reading from the same sheet of music. And if someone leaves, all that knowledge doesn’t go with them.”
“Right, says Hildig. “The biggest difficulty in training an organization on GPS is that companies will change the team. They’ll change the grade checkers on you, even operators, and suddenly you’re no longer building momentum toward that common goal.”
Develop in-house resources, what Chris Mazur at Leica calls a champion and Hildig a GPS manager, someone who understands the technology and can be a liaison between operators and management. Give them a role in the system and respect and reward their competence.
Build in follow-up systems. No matter how good the initial training, operators “find their own little ways of using the system,” says Lamar Hester at Trimble. “They limit themselves and may not be aware of a function that would allow them to complete a task easier.” Not to mention that technology continues to evolve, and to ensure your operators stay current, you should be prepared to invest in advanced workshops and seminars.
Allow adequate time. “People are investing in machine control because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find experienced operators,” says Vanneman. “Machine control enables less experienced operators to get their production up and develop accuracies it might take them years to develop manually. The catch is that too many contractors lose sight of their objectives and are so focused on an individual job that they don’t provide the opportunity for adequate training of the people who are at the basis of their productivity.”
“The economy is technology’s friend,” says Randy Noland at Carlson Machine Control. “Everyone has had to find ways to become leaner, and technology is one way to work efficiently and make machines more productive.” But not without operator training.
Which leads to task number eight: Review your training document, evaluate the degree to which you stuck to your guns and where you fell short. Maybe you rushed forward without identifying a champion, and now your operators lack resources to help them address the inevitable glitches. Maybe you didn’t anticipate downtime or down-season falloff, when you could have arranged opportunities for operators to gain additional experience or more specialized training. Or maybe everything went according to plan; your operators are productive and content, and your organization is ready for the next leap in productivity by way of asset management and real time communication between office and job site. Acknowledging that Noland is right on the money about productivity being critical to profitability, the moral of the story is that contractors are wise to define step by step how they intend to meet that goal. In a word: to get big, your task is to think small.
