One of the goals of most quality improvement efforts is to eliminate waste. Have you ever gone to a training program or class and that it was a waste of time? Here is a definition and example of the waste in training. Taking out waste will save time and money.
Waste is defined as anything that doesn’t add value. Eliminating waste is one of the easiest and least costly thing to do because it usually means deleting training programs or portions of training programs. If a learning activity doesn’t improve proficiency or shorten time to proficiency, it’s waste. Here are some examples of waste.
1. The Forgotten
We know that the retention rate for lectures is less than 20%. Everything that is forgotten the next day or next week is waste. At the end of a four week training program, few participants can remember what happened on the first few days.
2. Waiting Time
Companies often wait until they have enough employees to make up a class. Waiting time is often weeks or months. If the training is really important, waiting time will have a direct effect on performance.
3. Old Stuff
When training programs aren’t frequently updated, they become filled with out-of-date information, processes that have changed or are no longer used and old procedures. Take a blue pencil to these items or toss them in the trash because they are now waste.
4. Overstuffing
When you set a limited amount of time for a training program such as a day or week, there is always an urge to maximize participant time at the expense of what can actually be learned. Over time, more and more gets stuffed into the program. Imagine a week of sales training that includes the sales process, listening, communications skills, negotiating, product training, time management, prospecting, proposal writing, and presentation skills. Very little of this training will end up being used because it’s too much, too soon with too little practice. Most of it becomes waste.
5. Tests
Paper and pencil tests are relatively easy to score and easy to create. They are almost always about testing knowledge. However, there is often no correlation between doing well on a test and doing well on the job. These type of tests are often waste. Evaluating participants on-the-job is a more useful way of connecting the classroom and work.
Waste exists in other forms. Please add your examples of waste.
Let me add an example that you have touched upon in another post and with which I have a great deal of interest.
Collaboration when not appropriate. To rephrase, to use the collaborative approach as the default. Group learning is not always best, so apply collaboration in the design of training (learning) only when it makes sense regarding the objectives and the learners. There is a lot of temptation to use new collaboration software, to use group problem-solving, to use teams… when using KM programs, teaching an individual, or focusing on an individual is faster. [Of course this works both ways; depending on resources, existence of BKMs, objectives, etc - a collaborative approach might be the appropriate thing.]
This is an excellent point. Using wrong methodologies or untested ones if they don’t add value they are waste.