Educating Your Employees Pays!

There are many advantages to education and training being treated as a continuous investment opportunity, rather than as a cost of doing business that is minimized and adjusted according to business cycles. Providing employee education opportunities helps to establish a plant culture that emphasizes the importance of its employees. These opportunities take employee knowledge to a new level because they become informed about circumstances beyond their own immediate responsibilities.

A given culture supposes a given behavior, which in turn is linked to a desired and measurable objective or outcome. In food manufacturing, a useful outcome could be food product integrity (FPI). To achieve this result, a food product has to be sanitary, safe, and of quality. If any one of these elements fails and the market detects such failure, the financial impact can range from negligible to millions of dollars, and even to a plant closing, depending on which of the three elements failed and the subsequent market impact. So, investing in preventing such failures has huge dividends.

Generating an FPI culture provides a common and unifying goal for all employees, the results of which can and must be measured. A unifying goal assures that all departments align their responsibilities, tasks and activities to achieving such a goal. Under this scheme, counterproductive activities are rare. For example:

• Sales personnel would not promise a given quantity of a product to earn an extra bonus knowing that production cannot meet the promise.
• Production employees would not skip a changeover cleaning knowing that such “savings” will impact FPI with potentially disastrous results.
• Maintenance employees would not skip a scheduled preventive maintenance task knowing that such delay could imperil the product, the equipment, and the operating personnel.
• Sanitation would validate all cleaning procedures and educate and train employees to do each cleaning activity with the “first time right” attitude, knowing that a recleaning can be very costly.
• Receiving employees would not negotiate a temperature when receiving refrigerated raw materials, knowing that accepting materials in excess of certain temperatures could have serious food safety repercussions. They will also make sure that the thermometers they are using are calibrated.
• And, all records would be completed in real time; free of ambiguity, opinions, and falsifications; and truly reflect the conditions under which the food product was manufactured and distributed.
   

These employees have been educated and trained beyond their immediate responsibilities. They understand how their individual tasks are aligned to the unifying and measurable FPI goal and are conscious that any arbitrary deviation will have consequences. They have the knowledge and confidence to assess unusual situations or conditions and make reasonable decisions within the FPI parameters. They have been empowered with the necessary knowledge and pride and, as a result, they rarely, if ever, negotiate a food sanitation, safety, or quality parameter. They have culture.
 

Changing the Culture

But, how do we know whether employees have embraced the desired culture and are living it every day? Training teaches a person how to carry out a given activity. Education teaches a person what such activity contributes to food sanitation, safety, or quality and why it needs to be carried out the way the training indicates.

The results of training can be assessed through exit exams or hands-on evaluations which will determine the degree of understanding and retention at that moment in time. However, such training evaluation will say nothing about the expected future behavior of the employee. This can only be evaluated through follow-up verification activities to reinforce behavior change and assure sustainability of the new or modified behavior over time. This can only be achieved through continued floor observations, peer reviews, and recognitions of improved behavior until the desired behavior is fully ingrained in the trained employee.

For example, after the initial training or education activity, floor observations are made for days and weeks to evaluate whether the employees are carrying out the new or modified activity as trained or educated. Floor observations should be conducted without the employees knowing they are being observed. Why? For the same reason that a driver will not increase his driving speed above the speed limit if a police officer is monitoring traffic. We either behave because we have been educated to a standard, and will do so willingly, or we do it because we are under surveillance.

If the trained/educated person is behaving according to expectations, provide positive behavior recognition to acknowledge and reinforce the desired behavior. If the employee is misbehaving, the observer can make his or her presence known and watch whether or not the employee changes conduct. If the employee does not, it implies that the training was not understood, so retraining and reeducation is warranted. If the person does adjust the behavior after realizing that it is being observed, this implies that the training was effective, but not the educational component. In this case, further educational follow-up efforts on the floor are needed until the employee adopts the new/adjusted behavior and considers it the new normal.

Peer reviews also are useful to reinforce behavioral changes on a continuous basis. Since such reinforcement comes from within a group of peers and not from a supervisor, criticism and positive reinforcement are more easily accepted, especially if such encouragement comes from a respected mentor or coach who is part of the floor team. Brief, reinforcing group discussions before each shift are another way of encouraging the right behavior.
 

Evaluation and Measurement

The next question we need to ask is why and how investments in human resource development and behavioral changes are evaluated and measured?

Any training/education effort is expected to generate a desirable behavioral change in employees. To justify the investment, the behavioral change needs to generate some financial measurable benefits or returns. Therefore, it is critical that the education/training program be clearly linked to a financially measurable result or benefit. Examples of financially measurable benefits include less downtime for the issue to be resolved with improved maintenance; fewer recleanings with better cleaning procedures; fewer customer complaints with better routing of deliveries; and fewer rework/recycle/rejects with improved process controls.

The benefits or returns to education and training will need to be effectively communicated to upper management to reinforce the investment rather than the cost of human development. Say a new operational (process-related) or non-operational (prerequisite program-related) procedure is estimated to save five minutes and a given amount of a certain input. The monetary equivalent of the five minutes of time saved, plus the savings in the input used, is the final financial benefit or the return to:

1. Changing the procedure.
2. Retraining/educating respective personnel.
3. Daily floor observations and reinforcement for 21 days after the training to ensure effective adoption of the change.

These three investments (cash outflow) are compared with the expected time and input savings (cash inflows or savings in this case). A simple rate of Return on Investment (ROI) calculation or a payback period estimation will provide upper management with the information needed to go ahead, reject the investment proposal, or modify it to make it feasible, both technically and financially.
 

The Optimized Investment

What kind of matrix would a human resource department need to structure, implement, and manage to succeed in approaching education and training as an investment to be optimized rather than a cost to be minimized? Following are a few suggestions:

• Plant management needs to establish a unifying and over-arching measurable goal, such as food product integrity for the installation.
• Each department’s objective is aligned with this plant-wide unifying objective.
• All functions and positions within departments are aligned with the departments’ objectives.
• Education and training is designed to bring about operational and behavioral changes intended to improve operations and productivity.
• Each education/training activity is evaluated based on the results of the exit evaluations (short-term understanding and retention), and more importantly, on the final behavioral changes achieved on the floor.
• Appropriate statistics are developed to measure the financial impact of operational improvements based on behavioral changes.
• Human resource development is optimized by assigning financial resources to bring about the behavioral changes with the highest possible ROI.
• Annual technical and financial evaluation of the education/training program are implemented to identify opportunities for improvements.

The author is Global Manager, Food Safety Services Innovation, AIB International.