More Training?

So you’ve written your quality manual and your required procedures.   You’ve reviewed ISO 9001, and determined what additional work instructions you needed, and you’ve written them (Hopefully most of these work instructions are pictures or flow charts).

What’s next? Train!  Wait a minute, you say.  Didn’t we already do that? Well, yes, but there’s more to do.  Some organizations have a habit of writing well intended documents, but never doing the training that employees need to implement them.  The rule should be:  If it was important enough to write a document, it’s important enough to train in the document.

One company I worked with did a great job writing its procedures and work instructions.  Every employee had a handbook of the procedures he or she was to follow.  But a quick audit of the employees’ handbooks revealed all sorts of mark ups to the procedures, hand written by the employee, indicating to me that the procedures were not being followed as written.  Worse still, different employees doing the same job, had different mark ups.  Either document control was failing, or training was failing.  More likely both were failing.

You’ve trained in ISO 9001, but successful implementation requires that the procedures and work instructions you’ve created to implement the standard are followed.  Someday an auditor is going to arrive and he or she is going to audit against those procedures and work instructions.  Writing procedures is of little benefit if the workforce doesn’t know about them, or doesn’t know their responsibilities, which you’ve described in those documents.

Using the plan-do-check-act philosophy of ISO 9001, before training starts, there should be a training plan.  The training plan should outline what training is required for each job title or each employee.  The plan could be a training database (many commercial products of modest cost are available) or a collection of spreadsheets.  A record of the training plan(s) and the training completed should be available during the external audit.

Well trained employees are often more productive.  Training has side benefits.  In addition to informing the employees of their responsibilities, good training allows for two way communication between the employees and the trainer.  Employees will often know the work they do better than the author of the document that describes that work.  Training is an excellent way to get feedback from the employees doing the work.  That feedback will help the author improve the document, or correct employees’ misconceptions of what they are expected to do.

Some think training consumes valuable time on unproductive activity.  In fact the opposite is often the case.   For more information see www.rosehillsystems.com