Developing Staff Performance

Even the most capable and highest motivated staff member of your organization will not be productive without the necessary training and management direction. The better the training and direction, the more the output and the better its quality.

Many people think only of a formal training system to develop staff. Specific job skills and capabilities must be learned and refined for an individual staff member or work team to be productive. The skills needed range from simple physical tasks to complex human interactions. Providing information and teaching someone how to do administrative tasks may be relatively simple, but to develop sales, service, leadership and management skills is much more involved. Simple instructions or classroom sessions are usually not be enough. It may require not only classroom instruction, but an environment where on-the-job development is a priority.

Developing staff is more than just teaching knowledge and skills, it is communicating expectations and providing performance feedback. They form an informal, interactive development system in your organization. Regardless of the organization, it has a development system. Some are designed by conscious thought or process while others evolve over time. It makes sense if you've hired great people and your success depends on their productivity, to create a staff development system that creates productive staff members.

Knowledge is the information that enables employees to know how to respond correctly. It is obtained from company or industry sources such as manuals, publications, and websites. It can also be learned by viewing live presentations, videos, audio tapes, and even computer-based training, web-based training or just watching an employee do his or her job correctly.

Skill is the ability to accomplish something. Remember, an employee may know the task to do, however having the ability to do it well is something quite different. In the workplace, skill has usually referred to a physical task or human interaction, however today more and more, skill relates to creation or control of information. Skills can be learned by watching others but are best learned by practice. If it involves human interaction, coaching by a peer or superior is an excellent way to learn. In sales, service, and management, it might even require a third person to act as an observer or coach.

Expectations are the methods, procedures, and standard practices employees are expected to follow. Only when it is known what is expected, can a staff member meet or exceed those expectations. Expectations can be formal, written guidelines and policies as well as the "informal traditions" that are not written down, and may not even be verbalized often. Many organizations struggle with "defining their expectations" of employees, yet this can be one of the most productive acts the leadership can undertake.

Feedback is the instruction an employee is given to adjust his or her behavior. It enables the staff member to measure success and avoid failure. Without knowing if the action was successful or even done the way it should be, staff cannot improve. Without the awareness of the consequence of a mistake or violation of a policy, there will be little or no motivation to correct or improve.

Today, e-learning systems are "hot" and companies are beginning to invest significant sums of money into them with the hope of developing employees and boosting productivity. A better investment might be to improve the present staff development systems before putting it on the web. If the formal and informal development system doesn't work well, be sure you have an effective staff development system before it is converted to an e-learning system, or it will not make it better, only worse.

To succeed today requires that staff members be more productive, innovative, and effective than ever before. Today's economy demands more productivity from each individual at every level of the organization. Investing the time and effort to develop staff is an excellent strategy to improving profit and performance.

For a copy of the white paper "Developing Staff in Today's Challenging and Connected Economy," e-mail wayne@outlawgroup.com