A View from the Floor

TeamOJT Tip of the Month for May, 2005

When I look over training and human resources publications and participate in conferences on training and learning technologies, I am struck by how little attention is given to the needs of a large and highly important segment of the workforce-workers "on the floor."

For example, aviation maintenance technicians will agree that they make more mistakes using torque wrenches than any other factor. Yet technicians at most airlines receive no training on torque wrenches. Nor can they consult written procedures describing the correct use of torque wrenches. The manufacturer's maintenance manuals may say what to torque but not how to torque. Technicians end up learning by trial and error in a mostly "sink or swim" environment. NTSB reports are full of instances where incorrect torqueing brought down an airplane.

Similar situations exist in every industry in which workers lack the skills and knowledge to carry out daily duties. A machine tool company discovered that workers had never been formally trained to operate a forklift-yet they were doing it every day. Senior lab technicians at a biotechnology company were unable to document simple procedures for calculating and interpreting test results-a job they routinely performed incorrectly. Certified aerospace inspectors continually failed to detect serious flaws in metal components because they didn't know how to properly operate the test equipment. All these employees learned their jobs by "watching Joe do it." The problem, of course, is that Joe may have been a novice himself.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the Total Quality Management guru, once said that this buddy system of training would be "just like taking lessons on the piano from someone who never had a lesson on the piano. You will learn some that is right and some that is wrong. Neither teacher nor pupil will know what is right and what is wrong."

Managers are often shocked when various programs they try to implement fail. The best companies have learned the hard way that merely throwing technology at problems and investing in courses like "World Class Competitiveness" make little impact on quality. Employees miss the basics.

Workers on the floor represent an important, yet seemingly neglected segment of the workforce, and are suffering from too many years of poorly focused training. Training professionals need to get employees together and to find out from them what their needs are. We can't continue with this informal buddy system of on-the-job training.

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