Job Instruction Training – a Great Place to Start

By far the most common error we find in Job Instruction implementations, for organizations large and small, is that new trainers write Job Instruction Breakdowns (JIBs) without actually training any workers. They mistakenly think that “training cannot begin until all the breakdowns are made.” By the time the JIBs are made, they may not have confidence in using the 4-step method because they haven’t had a chance to practice it and the result may be that no training ever gets done.

It is more effective to “Write One, Train One” because you never know for sure if the JIB you made will work well until you “road test” it by teaching it and making needed adjustments in both content and form. This also gives new trainers an opportunity to practice using the 4-step method of instruction in a “trial mode” before actually training workers on the line. More importantly, your skill in making good JIBs will improve incrementally, and then exponentially, as you make, test and revise more breakdowns. In other words, what you learned from developing the last breakdown will help make your next breakdown that much better.

The Training Leadership Certification (TLC) program at the University of Kansas Health System was developed by Petal Bartlett in 2020 after she was hired to implement Job Instruction. In her extensive six-module program, where the JI training course is Module 3, she outlines the Content Development Process for tasks needing to be trained using JI. As an experienced schoolteacher, Petal has a host of teaching techniques she uses throughout to keep people engaged and, once they learn about Job Instruction Breakdowns, she has them take flash cards with the Content Development Process steps and try to put them in order. Very often, she says, participants place the step “Standardize” at the very front of the process thinking that a standard is first decided upon and then enforced. The actual process is just the opposite.

It is easy to think that a standard procedure can be determined up front and then simply taught and enforced. Just write the JIBs and go train them, right? Mr. Isao Kato, the Father of Standard Work Training at Toyota, told us when we were studying under him in Japan that when he determines standard work, “I depend on the operators, not the engineers.” While we certainly rely on engineers and other experts who understand the technical aspects of our product or service, how the work actually gets done is dependent on the skill, experience, know-how, and motivation of the people who do the work. Without their feedback and participation in the standardization process, we will continue our struggle with variation, instability and poor performance results.

The development process for getting to standardization, as outlined clearly in Petal’s TLC (see below), begins by observing the work being done and getting input from frontline team members to reach a consensus on the “one best way” we all should do the job. From there, the first draft of a JIB can be written and vetted with those responsible for our work standards to ensure the training content meets all critical requirements. We then test the JIB by actually teaching the job and getting feedback from both seasoned and new employees who we teach it to. The results allow us to revise the JIB – any missing Key Points, more correct and simpler words, better balance between Important Steps and Key Points, etc. – until we are ready to authorize it and plan for a strong training effort, not only for new workers who must learn to do the job but also for our current employees who are, for the most part, doing it differently. The final part of the process is for the work to be “standardized” which means everyone is doing it the same way each and every time it is done.

The training process is assisted and enforced by the Kaizen philosophy of continuous improvement which helps guide us toward standardization by allowing us to remove obstacles that get in the way of “100% adherence to the standard.” Here we first analyze the current condition of the workplace to find where opportunities for improvement lie. Elimination of waste in the process clears the way for standardizing the work on the improved way of doing it. This is an iterative process, though, and we hold the standard until a better way is found.

The Job Instruction method is an excellent means of getting started on continuous improvement because, in making the JIB and determining the “one best way” of doing a job, it engages our people moving them toward standardization of the work. When we enlist our experienced employees in helping us to make and test the JIBs and we teach those JIBs using the JI 4-step method, we are creating buy-in and motivation to following the standard which are essential elements to successfully reaching our goal of standardized work.