OJT and Management Commitment

TeamOJT Tip of the Month for July, 2006

It is absolutely critical that management endorses and actively supports your OJT program. Any work group in your organization should be capable of developing and implementing an OJT program, provided they have management support. There is no faster way to destroy employee morale than to fail to encourage employees truly to take charge of their own destiny. To do so demands a great deal of courage on the part of managers.

For the training program to succeed, all levels of management, from senior executives downward, must agree that there is a need for structured OJT. Commitment means that management provides the time and resources necessary for program success.

The degree to which management commits to the program correlates to the degree of integrity and consistency the system provides. Management attitudes and expectations have a marked effect on job performance, including the relative frequency of errors, even when employees are not responding to direct management instruction. In a report titled Human Reliability Impact on In-service Inspection: A Review and Analysis of Human Performance in Nondestructive Inspection (Rankin et al., 1985), prepared for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, scientists at the Battelle Human affairs Research Centers found that management attitudes regarding costs of mistakes and consequences of errors and their expectations have an impact on the training outcome itself.

Managers need to actively encourage participation and to make plans for having some of the best, highest-producing people away from their jobs for one to two hours each week to prepare training materials and later on to deliver the training.

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