Presenteeism: An Antidote

“My belief is that very few people go to work to do a bad job. I’d say that 98% of people who go to work want to do a great job.” - John Catlin, CEO, TACTICS Consulting

A portion of the November 6th webinar, Reusability 2.0: Simplifying Compliance Training, included a discussion between Catlin and panel host Cushing Anderson, VP of HR for IDC, on how to make it easy for employees to do their jobs well.

Catlin said that one of the greatest inhibitors of doing a good job was not “having what they need to do that job embedded into their workflow.” He said that companies would often try to solve the problem by building a new system that put all the information out there, but that such systems were often discarded within half a year, largely unused.

There’s a difference, Catlin suggested, between making information available online and making it useful. He said most people only needed a few things to do their jobs.

Catlin took a bank as an example, saying that each one has a credit risk manual that might stretch to nine volumes and 20,000 pages. When you have a customer in front of you, that’s a lot to go through. He said that any individual employee usually needed “about one or two percent, maximum, of that information, … the procedural information they need to do their job.”

So the person who’s structuring the content for presentation, Catlin said, needs to be aware of the difference between a policy, a process and a procedure. In other words, by category and type, instead of all mixed together as is often the case in corporate documentation. “Unless you structure content from the outset, it’s impossible to deliver successfully to the individual what they need.”

Catlin added that if you thought beyond the initial use and delivery of these kinds of performance support content, and structured it in terms of how it was going to be used, you could even “future proof” it in an XML format.

As Anderson said in response, “There’s research that suggests that 80% of the potential for productivity improvement comes from identifying what they’re calling presenteeism. Presenteeism is that people are on the job, but they’re not doing a good job. It’s not about absenteeism, where people aren’t there. It’s about people who can’t do a good job and often for the reasons you just described.”

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 11:04 pm by Dawn and is filed under Instructional design for single source, On-demand learning, Reusability 2.0, XML and learning standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.