In the industrial sector, keeping your equipment functioning is a top priority. A work stoppage can cost upward of a million dollars a day in some facilities, and the effects can quickly cascade across the whole enterprise and supply chain.
Although it is impossible to prevent equipment failure entirely, you can greatly reduce costly downtime by optimizing your employees’ knowledge and skills. Workers need industry knowledge to fully understand their role and how it impacts the organization. And they need strong technical skills that will enable them to keep equipment working at optimal performance and to predict machinery malfunctions before they occur.
This blog provides basic guidance for how to create a performance improvement program, along with insights into some best practices that will help you deliver the most impact.
How to Create a Performance Improvement Program
Step 1: Assess Your Processes, Points of Failure, and Defects
The first step is to perform an upfront assessment to document your most common points of failure and identify any defects that you need to eliminate from your workflow. A complete human performance improvement program has close ties to asset management strategy, so start by reviewing equipment criticality along with your processes. Doing so will help you to identify the key issues that require attention, outline a pathway for improvement, and highlight the leading success indicators to demonstrate return on investment (ROI) once the program is in place.
Step 2: Identify Key Tasks Related to Critical Equipment
Next, identify and analyze the key tasks your workers perform on critical equipment. Doing so will help you develop a list of the supporting knowledge and skills your workers need to perform their roles successfully. Using a top-down approach will enable you to gather all the facts necessary to make informed training decisions.
Cross-reference the current business metrics associated with key tasks (work rate, productivity, machine downtime, maintenance costs, etc.) with your existing training program’s learning objectives. This analysis will help you understand the state of your training and identify any gaps in the program. These gaps are an opportunity for you to develop new or revised content to ensure your people have the knowledge and skills to perform in their job roles.
Step 3: Conduct a Workforce Assessment
If you uncover a valid need for training, you can use existing job data and employee input to identify and rate job tasks. Once you know what defects need to be eliminated, which tasks need to be improved, and where there are gaps in your training, it’s time to assess the capabilities of your workforce. Perform a comprehensive knowledge and skills assessments built around the critical tasks you identified. Some individuals may be strong in knowledge and weak in skills, or vice versa. Conducting both knowledge and skills assessments will allow you to fully evaluate your workforce.
Step 4: Create Individual Development Plans
Evaluate the results of the upfront and workforce assessments, your equipment criticality, and your identified defects to detail the training gap. Then, use this information to design and develop individual development plans (IDPs) for your employees. When creating IDPs, be sure to tailor each employee’s training to that individual’s unique skills or knowledge gaps.
Tips for Creating an Effective Performance Improvement Program
A strong training program could include dozens of learning elements, so it is sometimes hard to be sure which components are necessary and which are merely nice to have. Here is some advice on prioritizing for the biggest possible impact.
Combine Hands-On Training and Classroom Learning
When you create your training program, build in opportunities both for hands-on training and for theoretical knowledge tied to critical equipment. Aim for an 80:20 split consisting of 80% on-the-job training (OJT) and 20% classroom learning (whether in-person, virtual instructor-led, or web-based) that outlines the principles behind equipment operation. Ask questions during OJT that reinforce what learners are doing and highlight the reasons behind the processes that they are performing. If your organization does not have an L&D department of its own, a good technical training partner can provide custom or off-the-shelf courses to fulfill your classroom learning.
Capture Knowledge from Veteran Workers
In addition to classroom and lab training courses, a strong maintenance program should also include efforts to capture valuable practical experience from senior employees so that knowledge can be passed on to incoming workers. Long-term machine operators possess an enormous amount of valuable expertise. With a knowledge capture process in place, the organization can preserve and share this expertise, so it’s not lost due to retirement, layoffs, or other transitions.
In the past, organizations would often ask veteran workers to train their replacements. These days, industrial organizations face a shortage of new talent or budget constraints that lower headcount capacity. This means that most senior workers may never meet their replacements—much less have the opportunity to train them.
An effective technical training program can help solve this issue when you gather input from veteran workers on best practices involving systems, equipment, and processes, and then incorporate that into your training. Organizations should recognize and incentivize experienced top performers to share their wisdom before they leave. Build these opportunities at regular intervals along an individual’s career path; for instance, every five or ten years.
Provide Precision Alignment Training
Misaligned components are a common source of machinery failure. Often, when a pump or other component is misaligned, the equipment will still run, but imprecise installation reduces its uptime. This issue can increase failure rates, forcing you to buy and install more components over time while shaving months off the equipment’s lifespan. Offering precision alignment training is a simple way to protect and increase your organization’s ROI for each piece of equipment every time workers perform repairs or maintenance tasks.
Focus on Proper Maintenance Techniques
Improper maintenance is another key contributor to equipment downtime. While most workers understand the importance of maintenance procedures, a lack of knowledge or specific skills can result in incomplete or incorrect application.
Let’s suppose a chemical company has installed a new industrial mixer. The reliability department asks a preventative maintenance (PM) technician to lubricate the gears on this mixer. Unfortunately, the PM has not received any in-depth information on how the mixer works and so ends up applying the wrong type of lubrication, which reduces the equipment’s efficiency and uptime. These breakdowns in communication are common—but you can circumvent them by prioritizing technical knowledge and open communication in your training.
Prioritize Troubleshooting Skills
Troubleshooting is one of the most neglected areas of maintaining equipment. As mentioned earlier, downtime can incur enormous costs, particularly when you require an outside technician. Well-trained employees can cut these costs by spotting precursors before they cause a failure and by performing minor repairs without the need for external help.
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Troubleshooting skills can also enable workers to look beyond the most obvious solution. In industrial facilities, workers tend to treat the symptoms of mechanical issues without identifying their root cause. While this tendency may keep the equipment running for the short term, it reduces the full value of that machinery. Employees with strong troubleshooting skills are more adept at identifying the root cause of a problem, leading to a more permanent fix.
Provide Refresher Instruction for Infrequent or Seasonal Procedures
If your organization has maintenance tasks that employees perform only a few times a year, consider offering review sessions or quick behavioral nudges (checklists, short videos, microlearning modules) on those procedures. These reviews can be available to workers anytime in a readily accessible format. They do not have to cost a lot of money or take people away from their workstations. But they can help reduce costly errors by making sure your people are prepared and confident in the moment of need.
Maximize Equipment Uptime by Optimizing Your Workers
Despite the enormous impact that workers have on equipment uptime, many organizations underprioritize the human factor. Targeted technical training is an investment in your workers and in the future of your organization. Equipping your workers with skills and critical knowledge increases your equipment uptime and the resulting ROI. It will also make your people feel more valued, improving employee engagement and retention.
For more information on optimizing your workforce, learn about our craft skills and EHS training programs.
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