Your normal forklift operator calls in sick. In order to keep up with production goals, you need to shift another operator into the forklift for a day or two. You know they’ve been through the training class on forklift operations, so you put them behind the wheel and send them out to work. A couple of hours later, you get a call over the radio; your operator has been in an accident. Fortunately, nobody was injured, but the forklift hit a storage rack and the resulting damage halts production for several shifts for cleanup and damage repair.
Now, the hard questions start coming. Why was this employee on the forklift? Were they adequately trained? Were they qualified? Did they have the required proficiency? Had they been checked out on that specific type of lift? If you don’t have the right answers to those questions right away, a bad day becomes much worse.
When assigning an employee a job, it’s not enough to know they’ve been through training. You have to know that they are in full compliance with all requirements.
There’s a common belief that managing training compliance is a simple matter of documenting that an employee has attended the appropriate training events, and that belief is false. It goes back to the days of tracking training using spreadsheets. The easiest way to organize your training information is by cross referencing the person with the training they’ve participated in. That results in a simple two-dimensional matrix that is easy to represent using a spreadsheet. Training Managers would use the training date in the spreadsheet to show when the training took place, and they could easily show that a given employee had taken a given course on a given date.
We call that attendance tracking and there are two huge problems with that.
First, it is an incomplete picture of the requirements. Simply taking a class may not be enough. It may have an expiration date. It may need to be repeated. It may be ‘refreshed’ by taking a designated refresher course instead of retaking the original. It may be able to be met through another course or courses. There may be additional, non classroom based requirements that aren’t captured in simple attendance. There may have been procedure revisions that must be accounted for. Verifying that the training is adequate, correct, complete, and timely cannot be done with simple attendance.
Second, when a supervisor is out on the line, trying to slot in people for the tasks she has scheduled, it doesn’t matter to her how much training the employees have attended; she needs to know which one of her workers have met all the specific requirements needed to do the tasks she needs done and simple attendance will not tell her that.
Not easily, anyway.
So, how do we manage worker compliance, ensuring that our employees meet all the requirements to perform their assigned jobs? How do we make it easy to verify that their training is adequate, current, complete, and timely?
Step one is to recognize that training compliance is NOT based on the worker; it is based on the task assigned. Referring back to our forklift operator, we build a Requirements Matrix for the task because when you think about it, that’s where the worker requirements originate from, the assigned task. We look up the regulatory requirements, and find that they fall into three categories; classroom training, On the Job Training, and a formally evaluated practical exam. Then we look at our corporate and local policies and procedures for any additional requirements and assign all of these requirements to the forklift operator job.
Step two is to recognize that a two dimensional spreadsheet approach is inadequate and we need at least three dimensions, one table for each; worker and their current training, job and its requirements, and worker and their job assignments. By linking these three tables, we can now assign an employee to a job, then cast the job requirements to the employee, and immediately check their training history to see if they meet all the requirements.
That’s compliance, and that is what it takes to ensure that your people meet all the requirements to do the jobs you assign to them. This can take a lot of work, but fortunately, there are tools available to make the process easier. In the end the effort pays for itself in reduced downtime due to incidents and investigations since you can be assured that your people are fully compliant with the requirements of their jobs.
