Job Aids and Performance Support: Moving From Knowledge in the Classroom to Knowledge Everywhere

By Allison Rossett and Lisa Schafer

Job Aids and Performance Support in the Workplace gives us everything we’ve ever wanted to know about these invaluable tools and techniques!  Allison Rossett and Lisa Schafer have created a comprehensive, pragmatic, and very readable guide.  The authors don’t exaggerate when they claim it’s ‘knowledge everywhere.’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jun 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781118429617

Book preview

Preface

Long ago humans squinted at cave walls for guidance on hunting and cooking. Now we turn to mobile phones, personal information managers, desktop computers, and even laser beams for advice on just about everything. From retirement planning to auto repair, closing a sale, choosing the right password, speeding up a hard disk drive, getting the best price, dressing for success, dieting, dating, and thriving within organizational culture, we are not alone anymore.

That is what this book is about. It is about the shift from knowledge in the classroom to knowledge everywhere. Our focus is performance support.

Performance support is happening where we work and live. Under a tree and at a park bench, in a submarine, at a parent-teacher meeting, in a cubicle, or on the manufacturing floor, people reach beyond themselves for help in doing what needs to be done. It comes to us as extensive computer systems and as notes scribbled on the backs of envelopes. I create one every day, as I add, edit, and erase items on my to-do list. Right now, on a scratch pad next to my left hand, is a longish list. What’s there? Some names and numbers representing calls I should have returned yesterday. A nudge to get to the gym today, with a parenthetical reminder that I skipped yesterday. There’s also a reminder to keep working on my taxes and another pushing me to send a note thanking the people who contributed to a Saturday class. And then there is this Preface. That’s the item on my list with two bright red lines under it.

The best way to appreciate performance support is to look at examples showing how performance support solves problems and elevates practice.

I can remember twiddling my thumbs while waiting to do laundry in my dorm at college. When I wanted to do the wash, the washers and dryers were almost always busy, causing frustration, late nights, and early mornings. When I did get to it, the room, with scattered piles of laundry, wet and dry, disgusted me. This was the result of aggressive launderers who chucked wash on the table if you weren’t there to claim it. Enter e-Suds. e-Suds is civilizing the process by introducing information and technology. USA Technologies installed Internet-based laundry systems on several university campuses. The system tracks the use of washers and dryers and then alerts students by email, cell, or PDA to the status of their laundry and the washers and dryers in close proximity. Imagine the benefits of knowing the wash cycle is complete on your load, or that a washer and dryer are available in Chavez Dormitory, floor 3, north end.

My baby boomer life cries out for performance support. The Wall Street Journal (Greene, September 26, 2005, R1) described what Intel found when researching digital entertainment preferences. To their surprise, boomers did not want another way to watch TV. Most of all, they wanted help with their aged parents, especially support in dealing with dementia. This led the company to create a system to cope with not recognizing faces and voices, and not remembering what was talked about during the last conversation. Their system, caller ID on steroids, responds when the phone rings, with a photo, name, and topics covered during the last interaction, so that the senior can engage with more certainty and comfort.

And boomers need help themselves, too. My neck gets stiff more often now. The stiffness reduces my eagerness and ability to crane and twist to see what’s around me. This leads me to be, I’m afraid, just a little less thorough when driving in my car. Amazingly, my friend’s new car compensates. It warns him when he’s about to bump something such as another car, person, shrub, or fire hydrant. That’s great customized support in context and at the moment of need. While my GPS is a fine sidekick on the road, I now hunger for this feature.

Those are problems solved by performance support. But what about elevating performance at work? As a doctor approaches a hospital bed, radio frequency identification (RFID) can notify her personal digital assistant about this patient’s condition, history, medication, and recent test results. Of interest in this example, the physician could be alerted to a new publication relevant to this patient’s disease state. Standing beside the bed, the doctor is able to scan the text and determine what these findings might mean for this patient.

As you can see from these examples, performance support is immediate, present, targeted, and useful. In many ways, it is everything typical classroom instruction is not.

Training departments provide classes. Most are measured by how many they offer and how much they are appreciated.

Customers, citizens, and employees have different needs. They seek help answering questions, meeting expectations, contributing to strategic goals, responding to the unforeseen, dealing with torrents of information, and acting even smarter than they are. This book is about delivering that help in the form of information, guidance, and even advice, to those who need it, when and where they need it, through job aids and performance support.

It is beginning to happen. Annual studies by ASTD and Training magazine confirm the slow, steady trend away from classroom delivery and toward more technological approaches. Information, lessons, instructors, and events, not to mention music and entertainment, will be ubiquitous. They will go where they are needed and welcomed.

This shift to knowledge everywhere makes incredibly good sense. It suggests a revolution in workplace learning and support. But revolution is too strong a word for where we are today. Intimations, hints, glimmers, beginnings. Those words describe it better.

That is where Lisa Schafer and I come in. In this book we define possibilities. We honor the roots of performance support. We introduce two kinds of support, planners and sidekicks. We share scores of examples and introduce people doing great things in car washes, the Library of Congress, the executive suite, cubicles, and repair centers. We describe how the shift to distributed knowledge changes what everyone does, including professionals in our field. We point to promising vendors and software. We remind about the power of blending performance support and instructor-led programs. And we close with cautions. Performance support is best in the hands of savvy, motivated users.

We admit it. We are fans of job aids and performance support. In this book we use ideas, stories, examples, commentary, authorities, and resources to encourage changes in business as usual. As you’ll see, Lisa Schafer and I advocate a systematic shift from knowledge limited in time, place, and influence to knowledge everywhere, just about all the time. We hope to win you over and help you help the people you care about.

Allison Rossett

San Diego, California

June 12, 2006

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book tells the story of change and opportunity.

The first edition of this handbook was a tale of job aids and training and development. While there were hints at what computer technology would mean, the first edition dwelled on offices and factories, laminated cards, checklists, documentation, manuals, and workplace posters.

Of course the job aid has changed, right along with everything and everyone else. Enter computers. Enter software. Consider advances in the science of learning. Ponder the possibilities created by mobile devices like cell phones, iPods, and personal digital assistants. Then place all that in the context of heightened expectations about performance and results.

Leaps in technology are matched, perhaps even exceeded, by enlarged roles and hopes for the people dubbed trainers. No longer satisfied to mount a great event, rule a classroom, or command curriculum enshrined in three-ring binders, trainers are growing into workforce learning professionals, performance consultants, and blended and e-learning specialists with responsibility for solution systems and strategic accomplishments. Their work extends beyond moments in time and place to influence, information, and even lessons that go where the challenges of work and life are. They must provide support when and where required, by people or by systems that deliver the smarts to those with needs. That’s right—via job aids and performance support. Welcome to the era of convergence!

WHAT IS PERFORMANCE SUPPORT?

A helper in life and work, performance support is a repository for information, processes, and perspectives that inform and guide planning and action.

Let’s look at each component in this definition.

A helper in life and work. That’s the spirit of the concept. Performance support represents converged information and work, residing next to the individual, in close proximity to the challenge in order to offer help when help is needed.

Performance support gets its identity, in part, by being distinct from the individual, yet very, very close. On shelves above employees’ desks, in pockets, on dashboard displays, on walls next to equipment and chemicals, in drawers beneath computer keyboards, on cell phones, underneath and inside phones, via headphones, and even on matchbook covers, performance support enriches life and work.

An engineer is better able to execute a product launch because the organization has captured approaches and examples from the past and made them readily available on a PC. A driver avoids an odd-shaped shrub because his new car signals that it is there. A new retiree ponders the costs associated with an around-the-world cruise. With that question in mind, she receives customized financial guidance from her mutual fund company’s website reflecting her holdings, her life expectancy, her risk tolerance, and her other goals.

The engineer, driver, and retiree are receiving the help they crave in a new way. In the old days, they would have turned to driver’s ed, or the product launch manual, or retirement planning class. What they are getting now is targeted, tailored, and immediate.

Repository for information, processes, and perspectives. Performance support must store and make accessible critical information, processes, wisdom, and perspectives.

Am I ready for retirement? How much money will I need, given my circumstances and preferences? What is in hand? What is likely growth in the future? What must be done to close a gap, if there is one?

How do we launch products in this company? What lessons about product launch have we learned in the past? Information, rules, approaches, and viewpoints must be assembled in order to begin to answer these questions.

Right now and in this place, are there threats near my car? What threats? Where are they?

Informs and guides. Sometimes a situation is so unforgiving that a specific response must be informed by performance support, either via technology or a print aid. When displays in a nuclear-power plant alert to a problem, for example, the operator’s response must be precise. No gray area here. No ambiguity. No opportunity for individual foibles. The same is true for the preflight precautions taken by the crew of a commercial airliner. Even though they have done it many times, a print job aid, the most basic form of performance support, tells the pilot and co-pilot what to do. The consequences of an error are too significant to allow pilots to do their thing or to have a bad day or moment.

As guides, performance support expands perspectives and approaches to a job, task, or opportunity. Motorola provides an elegant example. Eager to encourage more participation by students in classes, Motorola adorned tent cards with a space for names on one side and guidance on the other. Ask questions. Apply what you are learning to your work. Acknowledge others’ contributions. Ask another question. And so on and so forth. So simple, so useful.

Apple Computer was eager to help new people orient to work swiftly and comfortably. They used technology to collect opinions from more veteran employees on topics as diverse as managing priorities and locating a good Thai restaurant. They made it all available online.

Those resources were designed to guide decisions and to enhance confidence. Let’s move into the quick-food world. It is active and pressured back there, where the food is produced. The new burger chef at a quick-food restaurant feels better about those first hours on the job because food production and safety procedures are posted in plain view.

Performance support can also deliver attitude adjustment. In The New Yorker, a writer described encountering an instructive note about how not to have a breakdown when the copy machine breaks down. Item 4 on the list taped to the machine reads: Please try not to take it personally when the machine has its problems ... it’s just a machine. In other words, please don’t bang, beat, bruise, or otherwise abuse it. It won’t help. No rules or instructions here; enjoy gentle and comforting advice on how to handle the inevitable aggravations associated with using this copy machine.

Guidance can extend to nagging. B.J. Fogg (2003) introduced the concept of captology. Captology is a made-up word which stands for computer-as-persuasive-technology. A favorite example is quitnet.org. On that website, people who want to quit smoking commit to the effort and receive support for the challenges to come. When the smoker signs up, she is asked how much she smokes and for how long. Guidance is tailored to individual responses; subsequent guidance targets key needs, such as selecting the right date to commence the effort to quit. You wouldn’t want to commence two weeks before your daughter’s giant wedding. Information is pushed to members based on what research indicates they need to give up cigarettes. Imagine that, after a beastly day at work, you find yourself dying for a smoke. Go to the website, and you are offered an opportunity to join a group. They encourage you to stay the course and stay away from cigarettes.

Planning and action. Early definitions of job aids (Harless, 1986) highlighted procedures, action, and information. Rossett and Gautier-Downes (1991) expanded the definition to incorporate more cognitive perspectives that include approaches to a problem and ways of reflecting and analyzing. While performance support is of obvious value in identifying and fixing a spelling error in a word processed document or purging the house of the smell of fish, benefits extend to topics like planning retirement and evaluating strategies to mitigate security concerns. Consider burger assembly. Burger assembly is an example of sidekick performance support. It is there as the tasty components are put together. Getting ready for retirement requires planner performance support. The program helps reflect on all that is involved in readying for a successful

Reviews for Job Aids and Performance Support

[skrabut · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Improving your performance may be as simple as having a job aid on hand. Take a recipe for example. Recipes are a job aid used to help you bake a cake or make a casserole. When you are just learning to make this particular dish, you might have to refer to it often to get the dish right; if you make the dish often, you might have to refer to the recipe occasionally.  Nonetheless, it certainly is convenient to have these job aids handy when you need them. Read more.