Time

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about time; the fact that it has been a long time since I have added to this blog; that way in which time incrementally unravels; its constancy in the calculation of value; and the manner in which it continuously, and unerringly chronicles our transition from inception to cessation.

Increasingly complicated machines help to measure time with more precision and accuracy. As our scientific cultures advanced through the ages, we replicated and miniaturized the orderly procession of heavenly bodies once used to track the progression of time; cycles of moon phases replaced by cycles of mainsprings replaced by on-off circuits of semiconductor technology.

The increased resolution of our time-lens has worldly implications. As time is a component of every process, greater detail in our picture of time provides greater information about the event of interest. We are not being merely metaphorical when the CERN Large Hadron Collider is referred to as a time machine; it is a clock of grand proportions able to measure events increasingly close to time zero.

Is there a place where time begins? People with much higher IQ's than I have considered that mathematical potential. However, I prefer to see time as a circle, rather than a line. Like the infinitesimal calculus, as we look more closely at the ultimate limit, we find ourselves never really getting closer to the beginning; the tapestry of life continuously unravels with constant and unending detail as we dive deeper into the Mandelbrot set of knowledge.

But what does it all mean? Why does it matter?

In spite of the infinite nature of time, each of our personal, "this lifetime", experience with time is clearly and unavoidably limited. We exist as we are, far too briefly. Yet we sometimes spend time with abandon, perhaps on frivolous activities, unable to balance the value of living in the present versus planning for the future. For sure, it is not easy to spend time wisely.

There is no "answer" to these questions, but there is a suggestion: be thankful for the time you have been given to live. By taking a few moments each day to acknowledge this limitation, you provide the impetus to savor the day, hour, second, or moment as it arrives, and then passes into the past, offering the opportunity to more greatly appreciate your personal time horizon.

The Price of Profit

Much of our professional life is spent quantifying success. Every business is involved in some aspect of sales in the sense of exchanging dollars for product, so the "bottom line" way of assessing productivity - that is to compare revenue versus expenses - is the universally established way to measure success. Clearly, the greater the profit, the healthier the company. Or is it?

As witnessed by the recent BP disaster - one that is by no means an isolated event - has the business model singularly fueled by profit become too hazardous to our health? At the risk of oversimplifying, the public company model that values profit above all else supports the kind of cost-cutting that places men and environment at too great a risk. I am sure many more details will be uncovered regarding cost-cutting strategies that provided short-term profits to investors and other stakeholders. Tragically, the long-term risks of these policies were ignored.

It is easy to cast BP as an environmentally corrupt company, but to be fair to BP and thousands of other companies who operate within the public company model, the constant pressure to generate profit above any other value supports the kind of reckless behavior recently (and historically) witnessed. Oil producing companies probably do need greater rules, restrictions and safeguards (banking industry too?), and we and our environments do require greater assurances that oil can be mined without undue risk - given that we can accurately compute the risk of such complex conditions.

However, "the problem" if you will, is much greater than BP. I am not referring to the politics of oil, or coal, or any of the other dirty industries upon which our culture and lifestyle depend. I am referring to the standard business model whose sole emphasis is profit. Even so-called "green" companies must sustain a profit in order to continue in their noble causes. The corporation is an organism without a conscience; a conceptual machine driven by humans who in turn drive machines, other animals, consume resources, and produce profit for stakeholders. It is not surprising that when we look we find abuse proliferating in the corporation.

Unlike the criminal who defends his actions as the result of an abusive childhood, the corporation offers no defense for its actions. In spite of concise mission statements and media campaigns heralding community values, the true mission of any corporation is profit, and any action that increases expenses without offsetting profit is strongly reconsidered. Undoubtedly, BP managers made bad decisions regarding cost-cutting and our environment will pay the price for many years to come - in addition to the men whose lives were lost. However, when we take a moment to examine the reasons that BP and any other company make the decisions they do, it is to maximize profit, often at the expense of long-term interests.

It is the nature of public companies for stakeholders to make such demands on corporate personnel. Certainly CEO's have a choice: to comply, or find a different job. Would they find a company that truly values their employees, the environment, contribution to public welfare, etc.? Well, maybe there are some companies that do this, but the core value proposition of a company of profitability places altruism in direct conflict with the genetic predisposition of a corporate entity - that of generating profit.

Only when the profit motive changes will the behavior of the company change.

Effective Learning

How may times have you attended a "training program" and at the end of the presentation wondered if you had actually learned anything? I know I have. It wasn't because I was daydreaming that I did not learn as much as I had hoped, it is that the modern business culture has confused "presentation" with "education." There is a big difference between the outcomes of a presentation and an effective educational experience; a presentation only suggests learning, but education requires learning as a core purpose and outcome. I believe one reason for this confusion stems from the ease of which we are enamored by visual stimuli. In other words, when someone makes a nifty multimedia slide presentation we assume that its apparent complexity promotes efficient information transfer. Unfortunately, the visual appeal of a presentation is much less important than the "function" of the presentation.

An educational program has only one function - to provide employees with a systematic experience with new rules enabling the application of those rules to new or diverse situations. If this function does not occur the training program is not educational. It might be entertaining, enjoyable, and even thought provoking, but if the program does not influence your behavior in meaningful ways, the educational process has occurred.

Demonstration of learning is an often overlooked feature of the educational process. How many times have you received a "certificate of training" for sitting in your chair and staring forward for a few hours? The only certification of this style of learning is that you were physically present in the room. Real education requires demonstration of skill. While the practical problems of individual demonstration of learning are considerable, especially in large groups, the fact is that until we see evidence of improved action, we have no valid measure that learning has occurred. It may appear relatively easy and efficient for a presenter to deliver a training program to large groups of people, but the efficiency is illusory as no evidence of any real education has occurred.

It is easy to malign the standard presentation process. But what can be done to make education more effective while retaining its efficiency?

When you really want your employees to learn something, divide the material into small modules so that employees can complete each module in less than twenty minutes. Ask employees questions that provide a reasonable indication that they can apply this knowledge to new situations. Time the test so that they must demonstrate a reasonable level of fluency with the information. Use a variety of question formats, such as fill-in the blank, matching, exclusion, etc., as each kind of question demonstrates a different kind of understanding. If you really want your employees to learn, you need to validate the educational process by observing and recording your employees' behavior on an individual basis.

Intelligence

What is intelligence? It is interesting that a phenomenon so pervasive can be so difficult to define and quantify. Surely you are familiar with IQ (Intelligence Quotient) tests. Of the many purposes of creating IQ tests and administering these tests to countless persons is the benefit of being able to predict future outcomes. After all, knowing that someone is intelligent is not particularly valuable when isolated from the effect of intelligence in producing a meaningful outcome. Thus one benefit of IQ scores comes from being able to predict that an intelligent person will perform well in certain work scenarios, etc.

While determining a person's IQ score seems useful as it provides us a discrete value to compare to other scores, as a practical matter, the IQ score does not predict future outcomes as well as we would like. Not surprisingly, there are other factors that overcome the predictability of IQ scores. For example, motivation and cultural factors play important roles in success, and of course a more fundamental issue with IQ scores concerns its generality or applicability to diverse situations outside of the test scenarios. For example, someone with a high IQ score may in fact be a very bad electrician. It is not that electricians do not need to be smart, in fact, I would suggest that intelligence is very important to success as an electrician. However, there are many other important skills that are relevant to this trade, such as color vision, manual dexterity, physical strength, attention to detail, understanding complex instructions and procedures, etc.

Intelligence tests can be important when the skills tested are relevant to the work situation. Using this perspective, one could conceivably develop an intelligence test for each job classification, a generally useful idea. More generally, we can consider that there are a seemingly infinite number of different kinds of intelligences, and a truly comprehensive intelligence assessment might require literally thousands of different kinds of questions and demonstrations of skill.

A behavioral perspective on intelligence suggests that each action demonstrates a multitude of intelligence, and each of us posses varied skill (intelligence) with regard to these intelligences. For example, a wonderfully skilled pianist may be substantially deficient in being able to give someone a decent haircut. Certainly the pianist could learn how to cut hair if motivated to do so, but at the time of measurement, the tested pianist did not have that skill and his deficiency would be noted. Once the pianist learned to cut hair he would no longer possesses that deficiency

There is considerable overlap between the concept of intelligence and the emergence of behavior. Moreover, each behavior demonstrates intelligence, and the more behaviors we can demonstrate in diverse situations, the more intelligent we are. Intelligence is not usefully described as a capability. While we can speak of intelligence in the abstract, unused intelligence is not behaviorally valuable. Intelligence observed as behavior is valuable because it effects a meaningful outcome.

Don't Delay

In this blog I would like to discuss a behavioral law, extensively studied in the research laboratory, that affects the value of every employee-customer interaction. It will be summarized as follows: the value of an outcome depends on the delay to that outcome.

Here are four important implications of this law:

1. Once a customer has identified their need, the more quickly it is delivered, the more valuable will be the customer’s perception of the outcome. For example, the faster you deliver the camera, resolve the complaint, complete the repair, produce the print, etc., the greater will be its perceived value.

2. As delay to a desired outcome increases, the value of that outcome decreases. No matter how elaborate your personal justification of the reasons for delayed action, procrastination systematically degrades a customer’s evaluation of your resulting hard work.

3. If you cannot meet an agreed upon action deadline, tell the customer when you will have it done, and be sure to alert the customer when it is done. If you wait for the customer to call, you have measurably diminished the value of your service. If you need more time to complete the transaction, alert the customer and re-establish agreement on the completion time.

4. Given two choices with the same outcome, a customer will choose the one with the shortest delay to obtain the outcome.

The law of delay is like the law of gravity, in that awareness does not negate its effect. For example, while you are free to personally disagree with the law of gravity, this offers no advantage in freeing yourself from its constant influence. The law of delay is equally non-negotiable. You may indeed provide to your customer an elaborate and highly believable justification for your delaying in providing some form of service, but the effect of delay always diminishes the value of your service compared to presenting that service with less delay.

It is important to note the effect of delay is relativistic. We remember how photo finishing businesses prospered in the era of one hour processing. Reducing the time of film processing and printing from several days to a mere 60 minutes offered customers an opportunity to substantially reduce the delay to receive their finished prints. Plus, in many cases the individualized attention facilitated by small batch processing allowed quality to increase. A lot of money was made by capitalizing on the behavioral effect of reducing delay for photo processing services.

While the philosophical debate continues to rage whether or not the world contains absolutes, the world of retailing is defined not by the absolute best retailer, but by the better retailer among competitors. It is convenient to say the quality of your photo finishing is better than your competitor’s quality, as there continues to be no independent tool to measure photo finishing quality. Indeed, this measurement loophole continues to offer a significant promotional advantage. However, it is considerably more difficult to promote the advantage of purchasing a camera or some other hard good from your store when the competitor’s store offers the same item. Lowering your price is a well known strategy to motivate a customer’s purchase, but this strategy comes at great expense.

A much more economical strategy is to enhance the value of making a purchase at your store. By systematically decreasing delay you can meaningfully increase the level of customer service. Here are some examples:

1. Answer the phone after fewer rings, return voice-mail, email, and all other actions related to your communication system as soon as possible – especially for customer complaints.

2. Complete all services when due.

3. Open the door to your store at the appointed time.

4. Place special orders as quickly as possible and follow-up with the warehouse to ensure the order is shipped according to plan.

5. Whenever possible, complete a customer’s request while they are in your store.

6. Quickly welcome customers as they enter your store with a non-business greeting, e.g., “Good morning, nice to see you again.”

7. Process refunds quickly.

I am sure that you and your employees can find additional ways to reduce delay in achieving customer service. Once you have established with your employees this dimension of customer service, they can apply this concept to all future situations they may encounter. Some enterprising store owners might consider employing delay as a direct measure of customer service. That is, the longer it takes, the poorer the customer service. This concept is utilized in automobile repair shops where the time to complete a repair has been well established. You might consider measuring the length of time necessary to resolve a customer complaint. How long should it take? Each store will establish their own standards, but the best stores will minimize delay in delivering customer satisfaction.

The Employee's Perspective

In managing others we should consider two groups of people, those who think they are the best in their job, and those who know they are skirting the system. Let's consider the first group, those who think that they are doing their job better than anyone else in the company. These people have a difficult time understanding why they are not receiving greater recognition for their hard work. From their point of view, their contributions are largely ignored and they tend to resent their supervisor's ambivalence. Worse, they resent the attention their supervisors give to others for work seemingly inferior to their work. Do not be surprised if one day this employee decides that he is seeking greener pastures, needs to goes back to school, or some other seemingly reasonable endeavor. The real reason he is leaving is that in his mind you have not met his expectations for feedback.

Feedback is critically important, and will be considered in more detail at another time. For now, let's focus on the core experience of unfulfilled expectation for feedback from the point of view of the employee. He truly believes he is working to full capacity, and from his unique perspective, he is doing a great job. After all, no one has told him otherwise, so he is free to derive his own assessment of the quality of his work. An important issue that we must contend with, even as we begin to provide this employee additional feedback on his performance, is that the employee truly believes that he is meeting or exceeding the expectations for the job. When you take the time to provide "constructive criticism" the employee may view your coaching efforts as overly critical and unappreciative of his hard work. Such can be true even with the worst performing employees. All perspectives are derived from a point of view. The poor performing employee may be making a reasonable self-assessment based on his perspective. He cannot see things as you do, and thus he believes that he is performing well.

When you begin to help this under-performing employee be sure to obtain his self-assessment. If he believes that his performance is exemplary, but it is not, (and the employee is worth keeping) it may be beneficial to set smaller goals. If you inform the employee of the true state of affairs, that he is for example the worst performer in the company, the sudden loss of personal value may be too much for him to handle, significantly increasing the likelihood of leaving the company.

All of this may seem overly gentle, as if you are coddling the poor performing employee. Not so. You are managing the employee on an individual basis and recognizing that while performance standards have been fairly set for all employees, the steps one must take in reaching those standards must remain flexible. Without doubt there is a bright line to be drawn between evolving excellence and accepting deficiency. When you provide a corrective action to an employee, acknowledge the value of his current efforts, and then raise the bar slowly, decisively and consistently, so that your employee can acquire the necessary skills and perspective to achieve excellence as you have defined it.

Time Machine

The idea of building a time machine continues to fuel the minds of science fiction writers. In the popular movie series, "Back To the Future" we learned about the "space-time continuum" - whatever that means, and in "The Terminator" the computer chip responsible for the future was destroyed so that the machines could not become "self-aware," and so on. Time travel is so useful to writing science fiction because it interjects a counter-intuitive viewpoint, especially when the future is changed by the past. Of course, when these scenarios are analyzed, our typical linear style of thinking is considerably challenged. For example, in the Terminator the machine was destroyed. How, then did it ever come to be? We cannot fully consider these sorts of questions, in the same way that my dog cannot understand the past - it is simply beyond our computational construction to consider events that have parallel outcomes.

What I find interesting about all of this, is that most of us already possess several kinds of very effective time machines. One such machine is our camera. When we take a picture, it freezes in incredible detail a moment in time, one that we can revisit whenever we want. In my closet I have several thousand photographs of my family, and we love to go back in time when our family was younger and relive those great moments in time together.

The same can be said for home movies. Capturing real-time movement on movie film used to be a fairly expensive proposition. With the advent of modern digital video cameras, we can inexpensively record and review memorable passages of our lives. Of course, this has led a new challenge - making videos that are interesting to review. Home video making now shares the same problem with other nearly perfected tools - the quality of the product depends on the skill of the user. Somewhere along the line, video camera manufacturers have forgotten to teach consumers how to make interesting movies.

There is much more to say about photography, and these musings will appear in future segments of the blog. But for now, I would like to turn the discussion of time machines to another wonderful technology - the book.

At some point in your life you have probably been asked to identify the famous person you would like to go back in time to meet. I know I have been asked that question on several occasions. Let's say that we have indeed constructed a time machine and we go back in time to meet Sigmund Freud. (You can select the famous person you would like to meet.)

So, we power up the "flux capacitor" and end up sitting on Freud's couch. (We will assume we speak German.) We spend a hour with Freud, talk to him about his theories and then return home a better person, right? Perhaps so, but we can do much better with a book.

Many of the great people you might want to meet would likely be able to spend a limited amount of time with you. They were busy with their careers, public engagements, etc. Meeting your favorite famous person would be very nice, and shaking their hands and holding a vibrant conversation with them would be great, but it is their thinking that hold the real excitement, and the real promise of the time machine. When I read a book by Freud or any other great intellect, I am not only going back in time, I am co-mingling with their minds - a real life example of the Vulcan "mind-meld." (Spock did it with his fingers, I do it with my eyes, or ears if the book is on CD.) Written words, laboriously penned before the advent of word-processors, aided only by bird feathers dipped in ink, provides a view of incredible clarity not only about the past, but about the process of advanced thinking, one that can be now studied in real-time, unfettered by the linear distance in the space-time continuum.

The economy of this kind of time machine is startling; for a few dollars I can purchase a book by any great author, containing the exact thinking that this person wanted me to have, to study and to make my own; priceless information written by the person who originated those ideas. The book is a time capsule of incredible power and I cannot think of a more valuable invention for the benefit of human civilization.

Informed Opinions

At some point or another you will be asked your opinion on a subject of interest to your supervisor. In your zeal to appear decisive and assertive you state your mind, only to later regret that you had been so decisive and assertive given that there were other views with equal merit. Well, at least that has happened to me. The problem with opinions is that their nature suggests decisiveness and assertiveness, but they also tend to reflect shallow thinking. Now don't get me wrong, I am not calling you shallow, but the common expectation of an opinion is that it expresses a core belief, and is not the result of a careful or methodical analysis. It is my opinion that our opinions should offer a deeper understanding of an issue.

Maybe we should keep it that way; when we are asked for our opinions we should be allowed to state our minds. Ah, to live in the perfect world! So, when asked, do we speak our minds, or do we answer in a way that promotes the view that our opinions should be based on a careful analysis of the multidimensional world in which we operate? Of course, it is my opinion that when we are asked for our opinions we should be fair to the broader perspective and state that there are some good points and bad points about the issue.

At first glance this response might appear vague and avoiding of commitment. Indeed, there is some avoiding going on, but it is more like avoiding being painted into a corner. While there are some things that have no positive aspects, and likewise, some events are entirely negative, the vast majority of business decisions requires a balance between the reality of positive and negative outcomes.

It is essential to recognize a fuller range of potential outcomes, for ignoring them serves no benefit to the opinion maker. In effect, an opinion is an assessment of these outcomes - an ever multiplying polynomial of pros and cons. Opinions based on few such considerations is not properly justified and the resulting action will inevitably face the reality of negative opposition.

So what do we do when we are asked for our opinions on a business matter? We should state that there are pros and cons. If we are then asked for more detail, we can then list and weigh the pros and cons in order to construct a qualified opinion on the matter.

An informed opinion illustrates that you are aware of the factors that affect the decision process. However, one need not walk around with ready-made opinions on all sorts of issues. Instead, we should be ready to acknowledge relevant factors, and when we need to, we can assess their current value so that we can compute a useful, meaningful and informed opinion.

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick

There are so many good books on improving one's management style. Their authors sound so competent and effective and maybe we resolve to utilize the suggestions made. Sometimes we have the opportunity to participate in specialized training on management styles. Some of us listen intently to the presentation and consider all of the ways that we can implement new techniques to be more effective, more positive, and less demeaning to our employees. Yet, when we return to our familiar work situations our previous management technique returns. The optimism of our education gives way to the realities of needing to make a difference to our supervisors, and we once again rely on the tried and true effects of verbally kicking someone in the butt to make them move faster down the improvement lane. Why do we continue to rely on these negative techniques when we know a better way?

One answer is that we confuse emotion and motivation. While we can motivate through emotion, such as when we yell, kick and scream at our employees to do more, or to do other things less, we are not required to motivate improvement in this way. It is simply that we want to make a very clear point that the employee's current performance is substandard, and yelling at them seems to be the best way to communicate that point. Right? Well, yes and no. We do communicate a lot by yelling at an employee, but the key point of underscoring our need for improvement does not need to be communicated this way. We can instead use another old fashioned, tried and true method of speaking softly, and carrying a big stick.

Yelling is only for the moment. Once the sound wave has passed over your employee's ears, the sound dissipates, never to be heard again. The employee will of course remember that he was yelled at, but that too fades with time. What is left in the employee's world is a residual stimulus that reminds him of the negative consequences of being yelled at, fired, demoted, etc., if his performance does not improve. The power of this residual stimulus comes not from the amount of anger you can show, but by the consequences of not improving performance. Thus, it is the "big stick" that motivates, and an effective manager need not resort to yelling. Instead, he can be equally, if not more effective by "speaking softly."

It is the consequences of our actions that motivate, not the stimulus. The more management power you have, the less you need to rely on the magnitude of your stimulus. When the consequences of accomplishment and failure are clearly delineated to your employees the form of your request diminishes in importance; a simple command to "get it done" is enough to get it done.

The next time you need to enforce policy, improve performance, reduce unwanted behavior, calmly explain to the employee what will happen if he continues with his current actions, and what will happen if he changes. Ask the employee if he understands what you are saying. Ask him to repeat it to you. And then ask for his commitment. You will find this style to be very effective, far less emotional, and increasingly helpful to your employees.

Training

Like the one time popular television comedy, “Everybody Loves Raymond,” many companies seem to love training. They proudly support in-house training departments to demonstrate their commitment to this aspect of employee improvement. True enough, many companies do provide effective training. However, far too often the real training within a company is provided “OTJ” - that is, “on the job.”

Employees learn a lot about their jobs and corporate expectations from other employees, co-workers, etc. Arguably, OTJ training is the only way to convey the experiential component of the job. Sometimes this experience is obtained from previous employment. It is often convenient to acquire an employee that “already knows the ropes,” or to use a more modern metaphor, “is plug and play.” However, some companies such as automobile dealerships actually prefer their new employees to be inexperienced in sales because it is easier to train unskilled (yet otherwise qualified) applicants rather than to “retrain” experienced employees. These companies reason that behavior change requires more effort than behavior acquisition, and in some ways this perspective is valid.

Learning is a daily objective for employees as they are subjected to a constant barrage of updates, changes, directives, goals, challenges, staff reductions, cutbacks and reorganizations, etc., all requiring significant adaptation to new working conditions. The efficiency in which managers can implement these changes directly affects corporate success. Therefore, training should be evaluated by its direct, positive financial benefit to the company.

In spite of the general attractiveness, complexity and ubiquity of (digital) slide presentations, this training modality remains largely ineffective as a training modality, as a result of confusing a “presentation” with methods and accountability of “training.” Even the most elaborately produced and entertaining digital slide presentation will constitute ineffective training unless the presenter requires participants to demonstrate their new skills. Furthermore, presentations rarely alter the conditions for employee action. Thus, employees will continue to perform as they did prior to the "training."

Commonly observed verbal repetition (and elucidation) of each bullet point in the presentation, generally given by one presenter to many “learners,” might appear satisfyingly efficient. However, for the most part, employees sit attentively during the training session, ask a few pertinent questions and return to their normal work environments only a little better than they were before the presentation. This ineffective scenario is further complicated by the requisite documentation that employees attending the “training” have been successfully “trained,” when in fact there is no evidence of such accomplishment, as there has been little or no observation or measurement of new skills.

While presentations are generally weak forms of training, significant amounts of learning and training occur as part of normal experience with a constantly changing environment, such as corporate mandates, managerial initiatives, changes in consumer preferences, competitive pressures, etc. Give your employees a fighting chance to accommodate and integrate your new performance expectations. Organize your memos detailing important procedural changes. Keep them brief and to the point. Leave out distracting graphics, cute pictures and overly ornate fonts that can be difficult to read and contribute little, if anything to message content. Tell your employees exactly what they need to know using clear, unambiguous sentences and provide them an efficient index system to find the information when they need it later to solve a problem.

Co-workers are an excellent source of information and experience and can substantially improve training program effectiveness by participating in “learning connections” between employees, allowing them to teach each other via the telephone for “audio based mentoring.” Significant amounts of training can occur through the audio channel, allowing your highly skilled employees to easily share their knowledge with other employees at distant locations. It might not seem “high-tech,” but telephone-based training is remarkably efficient and requires no capital outlay for new technology. Modern video/internet connections are a more modern form of such communication, and as it does not require significant physical movement of personnel, tele-training substantially reduces a sizable portion of common training expenses, such as airfare, hotel, car rental, meals, etc.

You may be surprised to learn that your company is already a “learning company” - even if your company does not have an official training department - given that some of your employees are likely very interested in measures of their performance compared to company standards. Are you specifically facilitating this kind of learning, or must your employees “figure out” whether they are doing well or not? If you have gone to the trouble of conducting employee training, ensure that your efforts and expenditures provide a measurable return on your investment by establishing meaningful measurement of learning, as well as measures of the impact of new employee skills on corporate profitability.

Management Technique

Employee behavior forms the basis for all commerce. Without employee behavior companies could create no products, no services and would have no business. While it may be easy to agree that employee behavior is a central concern to any business, managers often use their personal and highly varied experiences with employee behavior as a means of shaping their managerial technique, believing they "understand people" and "know what makes people tick," etc. Although extensive managerial experience can generate effective managerial technique, themethod of developing effective management solely through experience can sometimes be counterproductive. For example, managers with military experience may emphasize discipline in their civilian management style. While military management methods can certainly improve a lax team, the effectiveness of this style of management is generally maintained by an underlying and inescapable threat of coercion or punishment. Thus, while a military style of management adapted to the civilian workplace may show short-term advantages, it can also correlated with increases in undesirable or unproductive employee behavior, e.g., reduced quality, absenteeism, theft, etc., in response to the overall harshness of the techniques.

At the opposite end of the managerial spectrum we may find a more compassionate approach based on the view that employee satisfaction directly promotes performance excellence. Thus, to increase employee performance, we must first increase job satisfaction. While job satisfaction can be an important measure of managerial effectiveness it is doubtful whether satisfaction can produce superior employee performance. It is suggested that job satisfaction is at best a measure of one aspect of positive management technique rather than a direct cause of increased employee performance.

Improving performance through job satisfaction seems logical and legitimate. However, satisfied employees can be as unproductive and disruptive as unhappy, unsatisfied employees. Measures of job satisfaction are similar to measures of “awareness” commonly used to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. While an interesting measure of marketing effectiveness, awareness does not always correlate with increased sales. Like awareness, satisfaction is a measure, but not necessarily a direct influence over employee performance necessary to increase corporate performance.

Behavior Management offers a more direct approach to improving managerial technique: train specific managerial actions that will directly facilitate employee improvement. Combining job skill training with effective performance feedback enables your managers to communicate to their direct reports the job that needs to be done, when to do it, and what will happen after they do it. The recognition they receive will directly support their success and will naturally foster job satisfaction.

Controlling Improvement

The purpose of training an employee is to increase profit through by controlling environmental factors that support improvement in the employee's work performance. Unfortunately, the word control often carries a negative connotation, encouraging us to place a more attractive face on its underlying purpose. Thus, instead of saying that we are controlling our employees, we are motivating, educating, training, mentoring and empowering them to willingly and conscientiously improve their performance. Regardless of the word we use to describe the methods and motivation for employee improvement, the process invariably involves a change in some aspect of employees' work environments. This of course is the behavioral perspective, whereby we control employee performance through positive environmental manipulation.

We often refer to someone controlling another when coercive or unpleasant methods are used. However, control need not be cast in such negative light. Control refers only to the extent that some aspect of the environment influences a behavioral outcome. These factors are to be found in the work environment and affect our choice of action. That is, we continually balance our personal perspective of being in control, with the unavoidable result that our choice of action is directly influenced by a wide range of environmental factors, such as friends, family, co-workers, supervisors, etc. While we might be aware of some of the factors that control our decisions. While we cannot meaningfully evaluate all of the alternatives and their consequences prior to our actions, these myriad environmental factors due control our actions. We might be very aware of our sense of truth, but it is the consequence of behavior that provides the greatest influence and control over our actions.

We can never be totally aware of all of the factors that influence our actions. However, we can directly increase our efforts to provide new sources of control over employee behavior that positively impacts profitability. That is, the purpose of control in the business setting is to provide employees the means and motivation to increase their performance in measurable ways that benefits the corporation. Sometimes employees possess the factors that can control their positive influence toward the company. For example, with regard to customer service, some employees possess the ability to treat unfriendly customers with sufficient friendliness to improve the outcome. Therefore, we can promote existing behavior (friendly customer service) in a new situation (unfriendly customer) as "new behavior." When we have sufficiently controlled employees' educational and work experiences, we enable our employees to more reliably choose behavior that positively enhances their personal achievement as productivity for the company.

Measurement

What is the best way to measure improvement? How can we ensure new techniques learned through training programs will enhance employee behavior? In order to evaluate the return on our training investment we must first consider the “great training misconception” - that knowledge learned in one context will be automatically applies, or generalizes, to other situations sharing a similar characteristic. For example, if a salesperson learns to sell one kind of camera in the classroom setting, he should therefore be able to sell that camera in the store. A further form of generalization would predict that from learning to sell one kind of camera, the employee can now sell all kinds of cameras. While classroom training offers the essential ingredients for learning, we cannot assume employees will apply this new knowledge to their regular work settings.

One of the greatest challenges presented to corporate trainers, is to accurately measure the result of their efforts - in and outside of the classroom. Without confirmation of learning in the classroom, it will be unlikely that such learning will generalize to the work setting. When your company provides training, do you require your employees to demonstrate their learning prior to receiving credit for completing that training module? Most often, employees receive credit for the training session simply for sitting attentively through the training session. Rarely is there a valid, individualized demonstration that learning has occurred.

What is the goal of training? For example, in retail sales settings, is normally assumed that sales training will increase sales productivity. If front line managers were asked about the benefits of sales training they might convey that something was accomplished. Rarely, however, is the employee ever challenged to specifically demonstrate their new skills in the classroom and in the actual work environment. Thus, the correspondence between training and increases in employee performance remains at best, weak and tenuous.

It might seem overly harsh to require each employee to demonstrate and validate training. Conventional testing, such as multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank post-tests imply that something was learned, and is a reasonable way to validate training for policy and procedure changes, or federally mandated updates on programs such as “reducing sexual harassment” or “improving worker safety.” While educating employees on what they can and cannot do is an important function of training. However, training programs designed to increase employee performance are not reliably validated by multiple choice tests. Even the most detailed “pencil and paper” assessment of classroom training cannot adequately measure the effect of training on improving employee performance in the normal work setting.

Training effectiveness must be measured by changes in work performance. In the retail setting, sales skill training can only be evaluated by sales increases. In manufacturing settings, quality control training must result in decreased errors. If your company’s Performance Scorecards are not sensitive to the effects of training, it will be difficult to properly justify training program expenditures. Perhaps your company has a good assemblage of performance measures. Can they be focused on a small enough slice of sales or production? Will normal variation in sales or production obscure these improvements, leading to dissatisfaction with the rate of return on training investments?

It is not uncommon for companies that are experiencing financial difficulties to eliminate their training departments as part of general expense reduction. Such decisions are relatively easy to make, given typically poor cost/benefit measures and the difficulty of finding real evidence of employee improvement. Training program directors must be willing to sustain their jobs using real criteria - just like everyone else in the company must do. This way, when the time comes to evaluate and eliminate non-essential departments, the training department can prove their effectiveness and importance to company performance.

Make your training program a significant contributor your company’s success. Validate training by connecting it to real measures of employee improvement. Revise or eliminate ineffective training programs. Most employees do not want to waste their time attending boring, insignificant or otherwise irrelevant training. Invest in training, but demand ROI - as you would for other capital expenditures. This will ensure meaningful, cost-effective training and continued performance improvement.