Performing an OJT Needs Analysis

TeamOJT Tip of the Month for August, 2007

Recognizing a workforce performance problem, determining its cause, and identifying training as an appropriate intervention is the first step toward deciding if your organization needs structured OJT. Training may be a useful intervention if there is a gap between the desired and actual performance, and the problem is related to a business concern.

Suppose that the manager of a machine shop complains to you that there is too much downtime on three machines. As a result, the department is not meeting its defined objective of increasing production by 30 percent. Moral is at an all-time low because workers are putting in about 15 hours a week in overtime but production is still lagging. The number of worker complaints is skyrocketing.

This is a training issue if the cause of the machine downtime is that the machinists are damaging the machines because they do not know how to operate them properly. If so, a solution might be to train machinists on proper operation. If, however, the machines keep breaking down because they are old, the answer is likely not training the machinists but replacing the machines.

There can be many reasons to use structured OJT in a particular company or work area. Here are a few that you might find at your organization:

• Rapid changes in technology, experienced workers retiring, and new workers coming onboard all require that many employees be trained and retrained faster than ever before.
• Basic documentation on task accomplishment is out-or-date, incomplete, or nonexistent.
• Procedures are written one way but the job is performed in an entirely different manner, resulting in lack of standardization and consistency in task accomplishment.
• There is too much scrap or reworking, productivity rates are low, operating costs and accident rates are high, overtime is excessive, and morale is poor-all of which indicate a need to improve human performance.

In essence, costs, flexibility, and immediacy are all considerations that drive companies to develop structured on-the-job training.

When determining the need for a structured OJT program, you must do an assessment of the organization itself, and that means determining how the employees currently are functioning. If individuals and teams are not functioning well, no performance improvement effort will work. There's no great mystery involved in finding this type of information. Supervisors, managers, and frontline employees will tell you, assuming you have their trust. It's very important that you keep all information confidential and make certain your interviewees understand that.

You may have to prod a little to get correct information. Many managers and supervisors assume that their employees know more and are more skilled in the job tasks than is actually the case-and therefore need no training. Managers often are shocked when remedial programs they try to implement don't work. Even the best companies find that merely throwing technology at problems and investing in world-class competitiveness or similar programs make little or no impact on quality. What they find consistently is that employees don't know the basics. Employees are suffering from too many years of poorly focused training, most of which has been buddy system OJT. Companies would be wise not to assume any level of knowledge or skill when they assess the need for training.

Although technical training is the most recognized use of structured OJT, it is certainly not limited to technical tasks. Structured OJT is just as applicable to all types of tasks, including supervisory and managerial tasks such as conducting performance appraisals, holding meetings, providing employee feedback, briefing employees on company policies and practices, and handling customer complaints.

Don't forget, however, that, as in the machine shop example at the start of this chapter, there may be other solutions to some of these problems. And even when nontraining solutions are chosen, they are almost certain to involve some change in the organization's products, work methods, or policies. Such changes may produce a need for training, and you should monitor these changes to predict any such need.

If unsure whether to begin a structured OJT program, conduct a team job task analysis-see the September, 2003 Tip of the Month, "10 Simple Steps for Determining Training Needs." Get your answer from people on the front line. Employees know what the training needs are and the team job task analysis is an excellent process for clarifying these needs. (See also Chapter 4 in Training On the Job, ASTD Press, 2002, "Conduct a Team Job Task Analysis.")

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