Greetings--I work in a mfg plant as a Training Supervisor. To cut to the case, there are issues with defects and quality. First employee population, that is, of course blamed, is the new employee, of which I have built that program from the ground up. So I pulled out my tracking and evaluations stats and started digging for more info from the Quality Team. Come to find out, New Employees only commit about 8% of the total defects at our facility.

This leaves the tenured employees...who would be accountable for a very large majority of this quality problem.

Of course the first thing everyone wants to do is "retrain" everyone. (if I hear that term again, I think I will scream)

I have been trying to communicate and educate that this is not a skill issue, it's a will issue...that "retraining" will have little/no impact....that this problem needs a different approach. I suggested that we find out the root cause for WHY these people are choosing to 1. by-pass the process 2. not think that quality as a top priority, etc. 3. not caring, etc. That we could probably benefit from knowing more about our employee engagement scores, etc.

I was told that this is just a waste of time...that people just need to DO IT.

Ho Hum, I sigh. Any suggestions?

Throw a curve ball by walking with them down their road (curve ball because they might not expect you to just do that) and then lead them back to yours. That is -- agree that people need to "just do it" because they obviously already know how to, and then ask them to tell you how and why that occurs. Why do people feel compelled to "just do something" the right way every time? Look them in the eye and ask, "What drives you to do something the right way every time?"

Through this type of discussion - working with them from their perspective but still asking the tougher questions, you might be able to lead them to the very things you've been trying to tell them.

Just one of many possible ideas.

Jonesie,

From The TEAM Handbook:

"There is a widely held belief that an organization would have few, if any, problems if only employees would do their jobs correctly. As Dr. Joseph M. Juran pointed out years ago, this belief is incorrect."

"In fact, the potential to eliminate mistakes and errors lies mostly in the systems through which work is done, not in changing the employees."

"This observation has evolved into the rule of thumb that at least 85% of problems can only be corrected by changing systems (which are largely determined by management) and fewer than 15% are under the employee's control - and the split may lean even more toward the system."

"Even when it does appear that an individual is doing something wrong, often the trouble lies in how that employee was trained, which is a system problem."

"Once people recognize that systems create the majority of problems, they stop blaming employees. They instead ask which systems (and processes) need improvement and are more likely to seek out and find the true source of improvement."
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Quality is about improving processes, not fixing people.

Quality also comes from people feeling motivated to provide it. You can't provide quality without the people and you're very unlikely to have people providing quality without a good environment that motivates them to do so.

I don't know the specifics of at least when what where , how long, etc. However,
The usual suspects I would round up are the supervisors. How long has this been going on???
Why now has it surfaced? Why has supervision tolerated this behavior from the experienced staff ? Have you experienced transformational change to the extent that the senior staff are afraid of their jobs or just rendered semi competent, goes for supervisors too.
Motivation/will here is a symptom of something
else. Training seems to always be mentioned when they can't figure out the problem or won't face the problem.
Nero