Employee Refresher Training or Evaluation?
Many companies carry out annual refresher training in areas of high-risk activities. The refresher training is usually based on in-house standard operating procedures (SoP’s) developed by the management team.
It is quite common for a supervisor to sit an employee down, run through each SoP relevant to their job, and have them sign a declaration stating they understand and will follow the SoP requirements. This declaration form is filed, and the employee goes back to their everyday work. What is wrong with this approach?
Short answer – everything! Why? Because the employee carries out their activities day in and day out and already has their routine established. As we already know many incidents occur where experienced employees have incorporated shortcuts, mainly to save time. Therefore, sitting them down and running through an SoP is not likely to change anything.
A far more proactive approach with real gains is to evaluate the employee carrying out their work activities against the given SoPs in real-time. Over a period (1 to 4 weeks) the supervisor spends a few minutes each day watching an employee perform their work activities, taking notes to establish if their routine aligns with the SoP requirements. Where gaps are identified this allows the supervisor to target the training to recalibrate the employee’s work routine.
Here at Bedrock Solutions, we build competency-based SmartForms to capture the evidence for such in-house evaluations (includes short videos and photos). Having a review process that evaluates then targets the training, has the potential to save a company thousands of dollars!
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Date Posted: 25 August 2021