This is taken directly from the DoL’s e-mail notice, sent on March 18, 2010:

“The Department’s Employment and Training Administration and Wage and Hour Division published a final rule implementing changes to the H-2A program effective March 15, 2010.  One of the requirements in the rule (italics added) is for employers who employ H-2A workers to display a new H-2A poster where employees can readily see it.

“The poster is also available in Spanish.  It will be made available in other languages in the coming months.

“Please see the ‘elaws FirstStep Poster Advisor‘ for assistance on what other federal employment posters are required.”

We recommend that you visit the “elaws” home page if you haven’t been there recently, to catch up on Department of Labor requirements and notices. If you want — or need — to be informed of developments in the DoL as they occur, subscribe to their e-mail newsletter.

In the last two weeks we discussed an Olympic skater’s disqualification and came up with a possible root cause; in this case, human error. Specifically, everyone assumed everyone else was keeping track of the number of laps and, as it turned out, no one was.

Finding a root cause was the easy part. How does the skating team eliminate the root cause? How do they eliminate carelessness and inattention? How do they eliminate the possibility of even a momentary lapse in concentration? What’s the best corrective action they can take?

Carelessness and inattention being uniquely human qualities, the best corrective action, or countermeasure, is to do what you can under the rules to eliminate them. The first thing that comes to mind is an automated signal — for instance, a voice — triggered as a skater goes through an electronic gate.

They already have start and finish gates for all racing events. It wouldn’t be difficult to include a lap counter that would also prompt a skater, aurally or visually. Tell or show them what lap they’re on and when to change lanes. Wireless in-helmet communicators have been in use in the National Football League (NFL) for several years. The NFL ensures that no team has an unfair advantage. Everyone’s quarterback gets an in-helmet communicator.

While some, I expect, will say that communicators remove the “human factor” from the sport. What about body suits? Or the changes made to skates? Everyone has the same opportunity, so that it comes down to who is the better skater.

Better training under race conditions is another possibility. For instance, work on exercises that sharpen one’s mental acuity – concentration – during an event.

What does this have to do with your organization? Plenty. Take a look at your best and worst processes in terms of performance and consistency. Look at the numbers generated and determine where your weak points are. Why are those your weak points? What’s causing them?

Where is waste occurring, and how much? What kinds of waste are there?

Now, how do you reduce or eliminate waste? How do you prevent root causes of error and waste from recurring? Once you determine what corrective and/or preventive actions to take — and you take them — you’re on your way to making the process in question as foolproof as it can be.

Remember — inflated expectations are the worst form of sabotage. No process can ever be made completely foolproof. Nevertheless, you owe it to your customers — and your company — to try.

We received an inquiry recently on our process implementation page, where we ask: ‘How do you train and communicate with your team?’ A reader from a large school district wrote in using one of our new ‘Talkback‘ links saying that their district is in the midst of many changes. The district faces many communications and training challenges, especially when introducing new information technology for employees. The reader went on to ask, ‘How do large companies communicate and prepare training for organizational change or implementation?’

Will Employees Skip Training When A Customer Calls?

Though a school district may be an extreme example, it shares practical challenges similar to many geographically dispersed organizations where employees work independently. Teachers may work at dozens of locations. Culturally, teachers work independently most of the time and are highly self-directed. Every teacher answers to many customers–classroom parents–to whom they must be responsive. Daily schedules are rigid, driven by the defined length and periods of the school day. Non-class in-service training and meeting time is scheduled long in advance.

Any organization with a distributed workforce that works directly with customers faces similar training challenges. Does your workforce travel? Do your employees manage customer relationships in the field? Would your field employees skip training if a customer calls? Think: field sales, field service, field engineering, route delivery. For many such organizations, in-person group training is probably not practical.

 If training Is Not Practical, What Do You Do?

But training is still essential. For example, your route sales and delivery professionals across the Americas require training on a new ordering system. As in the case of teachers in a school district, their workdays are prescribed by customer’s strict time constraints. Any time available for training needs to be measured in tens of minutes. Further complicating matters, every employee’s availability is different.  And by the nature of their work and work culture, they operate independently.

Clearly, building a training program based on inflexible, one-size-fits all classroom training isn’t going work. But self-paced user-driven independently administered training would work. So video content was developed in three to 10-minute bites that employees could access at any time. The information was organized so that students could approach the training either sequentially, or as needed during the day.  Materials and delivery were customized to work with the limited mobile bandwidth and small screens employees had.

A technology partner configured an on-line “campus” web site, complete with quizzes and completion-tracking built in so that the corporation knew who had been exposed to the material, and had demonstrated proficiency. Compliance metrics helped the company roll-out new features and capabilities at times when metrics indicted likely acceptance by workers.

Do You Have a Distributed Training Challenge?

If your corporation, school district or other organization employs independent workers and you are budgeting for a training solution, contact Bizmanualz for a demonstration. While the content can be custom-developed for your organization, you will benefit by sharing the on-line infrastructure, which today is hosting proprietary video training for several large, distributed organizations.

With an understanding of your needs, your content can be developed and hosted in an on-line campus customized for you. Just as Bizmanualz has the largest library of pre-written policies and procedures, we can provide an existing on-line campus so that you don’t have to re-create the wheel.

Call us at (314) 863-5079 x18, e-mail Sales@bizmanualz.com or use the ‘Talkback’ dialog on our Training and Roll-Out page.

The thing about IT systems is that people have to use them. No matter the on-time, on budget performance of the development, the success of your install will be judged on how you move the needle on the metrics that the system was designed to affect. And to move the needle, users have to use your system effectively.

Getting users to use it takes two things. It takes buy-in, which you no doubt facilitated by involving users early to define their requirements. It was at this stage that you investigated and communicated to users the underlying core process that would be automated by your system. You got on the same page with users at the very beginning that the right work is in fact being automated.

Getting people to use your system requires their buy-in from the start, and bite-sized, context-sensitive training and communications after your system launches. Copyright, Bizmanualz, Inc. © 2009.

The second thing that you need to get users to use the system is communications and training, aka: a roll-out. Roll-out is when you remind users that they defined the requirements in the first place, and at that time you all agreed that by automating the core process, their lives would be easier, and the enterprise would benefit through improved metrics.

Remember, your million-dollar technology investment is at risk if people don’t use it. Your IT development was certainly serious. So your roll-out needs to be serious too, not a Band-Aid slapped on to try and recover.

Deployment: Who needs to know what, and when do they need to know it?

A serious roll-out reflects your understanding of how your system will actually be used. Remember those use-cases? OK, dig those up and consult them when planning your training and communications.

Develop a training plan that is consistent with the use-cases that you captured when you gathered user requirements. Copyright, Bizmanualz, Inc. © 2009.

Develop training from the point of view of your users. Think about the context in which the information will be used. That is, deploy training in formats appropriate for the setting. For example, field-delivery workers will have their hands full, literally. They may not have the time to attend live training for extended periods. Instead, break up the information into bit-size nuggets, and deliver it digitally to their mobile devices in visual or video format.

Deliver training in bit-sized nuggets as it is needed. Use formats that work in the situation. Make it as easy as possible or people to know what they need to know to use your system effectively. Copyright, Bizmanualz, Inc. © 2009.

Close the loop by updating standards, policies and procedures.

Remember how, early on, you and your users got on the same page about the core processes that you would be affecting? Ultimately, you need to close the loop. You need to update company standards, policies and procedures to reflect any changes that you have made in the work flow, compliance or standard practices.

It’s too easy to focus on the project management metrics and forget that ultimately it’s the impact of automation that matters. Do users remember that they set the requirements? Do they know how to use the system to do their job? Are people making the connection of improving metrics back to the technology causing it? Take a good look at your roll-out plans, and make sure that you get payback for your technology investments.

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