The pros of bottom-up training methodologies

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

As opposed to a top-down training methodology discussed last week, a bottom-up approach to training management relies on creativity, collaboration and communication, as well as a degree of organizational flexibility and agility. Essentially, under this approach, executive management defines high-level corporate and training goals. Smaller teams are responsible for defining targets that contribute to these goals and configuring training regimens accordingly. Team leads and managers are accountable to their supervisors, but teams themselves are graced with the flexibility to adjust training and procedural approaches on the basis of both their ‘up-close-and-personal’ knowledge of the processes they are exposed to most intimately and regularly, and the fresh insights that accompany new additions to the team who are recently trained or in the midst of training. The net result is teams, departments and the organization at large is able to achieve defined targets and goals more effectively and expeditiously.

In spite of the apparent benefits, bottom-up approaches can be difficult to adopt. Firstly, while in effect bottom-up approaches do not necessarily relinquish senior management of actual control, they often generate the perception of requiring managers, directors and executive staff to cede control. Also, the migration to a bottom-up approach from an entrenched, top-down approach will often generate an amount of institutional friction as it represents a degree of cultural change. In some cases, it can be difficult to convince established management/executives that a bottom-up approach ought to be tried.

That stated, the benefits of bottom-up training approaches are vast and include:

Common Goals: Since trainees and trainers are, by the nature of bottom-up training, driven by targets that contribute to organization-wide goals, they are more inclined to appreciate their role within the organization and understand how training relates to the accomplishment of organizational objectives.
Enhanced Communication: Bottom-up approaches thrive on communication. With top-down training approaches, trainers and trainees are handed sets and subsets of tasks that, in isolation, don’t engender a coherent sense of where a department or organization is headed and why. However, when those tasks are framed by targets, which in turn are framed by goals, employees are encouraged to go out of their comfort zone, interact with individuals from other teams and departments within the context of common goals, adopting more effective and holistic approaches as a result. This dynamic bleeds into training as trainers and teams craft more focused, nuanced training programs that are driven by big-picture thinking.
Continuous Improvement: Bottom-up methodologies invite all affected parties to provide feedback and proposed improvements on training programs to ensure they are as effective and efficient as possible. This include not only feedback from existing employees who may have informed perspectives and thoughtful suggestions; it also includes fresh insights from those who are new to the organization and have recently completed training or, in some cases, are in the midst of training. While obviously all suggestions from a new hire would not be immediately incorporated into an established program, the potential value of an outside perspective, unencumbered of the ‘corporate myopia’ that tends to afflict individuals and teams that have worked within an organization for protracted durations, and this is accomplished by leveraging individual talent more effectively.
Improved Morale: No successful business leader should need to be convinced of the virtue of a high level of employee morale. It boosts productivity, efficiency, retention, innovation and, ultimately, the bottom line. Bottom-up training approaches engender improved morale in three critical ways: Employees realize their insights and suggestions will be heard and valued; they will make the effort to communicate suggestions since they won’t see a futility in attempting to foster change; and they will have a greater level of job satisfaction by understanding how their work contributes to the whole.

While the benefits of a bottom-up training approach are clear, recall that the virtue of a top-down approach is simplicity. Bottom-up approaches can be more difficult to implement and manage, given they feature an array of insights, suggestions, proposed changes and approvals. However, training management software tools exist to streamline and prioritize information and also minimize the financial burden of any approach to training management.

For more on how to adopt an effective bottom-up training methodology, check out Cultivating Competence: Leveraging Training Tools for Measurable Results, an Intelex white paper.

The cons of top-down training

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

A training program’s effectiveness is determined by an organization’s chosen methodology for training new and existing employees. The most common and traditional approach to training management is also, on the surface, the most logical: In the traditional “Top-Down” approach, HR representatives, executives and other senior parties within an organization define the content, structure and objectives of training programs while managers and supervisors ensure new and existing employees complete requisite courses and fulfill training requirements.

This approach is, for many reasons, the most immediately appealing to senior management and human resources. Quite sensibly, it allows executive teams to structure the training regimens that, in principle, will endow employees with the skills and knowledge they need to perform their jobs to the best of their ability. In actuality, while this approach enables an organization to confidently meet regulatory, corporate, or standards-driven (e.g. ISO 9001) training requirements, it does not necessarily improve performance and cultivate employee competence.

While an appreciable measure of simplicity is inherent in the top-down approach, it is accompanied by a number of potential and business-critical weaknesses:

Lack of Cross-Team Communication: Just as quality management pioneer W. Edward Deming argued that thorough quality management is cultivated when all contributors have a sense of how their actions play into the bigger picture, organizations are best equipped to achieve high-level business goals when all individuals and teams have an understanding of how individual and team efforts contribute to the organization’s success. Isolated perspectives don’t give employees a sense of meaning in their jobs, and fail to motivate individuals to incorporate a sense of their organization’s mission into their day-to-day responsibilities. Cultivating a sense of purpose begins with training, and when training programs are dictated from the top, limited to narrowly defined tasks, and insensitive to how teams work together and how an operation functions as a whole, cross-team communication is inhibited and employees aren’t as motivated to work together to achieve organizational goals.
Protracted Management of Change: Any growing or established organization will have to handle change as departments expand or are restructured, as employees and senior staff come and go, and as improvements to existing structures are identified and implemented. Top-down training approaches ill-equip businesses to handle changes, especially in large organizations where a series of hierarchical tiers must be surmounted before essential training modifications are implemented.
Stagnation of Creativity: Employees directly exposed to the processes they execute day after day are the most likely to devise more creative ways to improve and streamline the systems they interact with, since they interact with those systems more closely than others in the organization. And in most cases, lessons learned and identified process improvements can be mapped directly back to training and leveraged to better prepare incoming personnel to do their jobs more effectively. Yet with top-down training approaches, new, useful ideas face an array of organizational hurdles that must be overcome before they can be institutionalized and rolled into new training. Not only does this inhibit the pace – or even existence – of continuous improvement in training management, it stifles the cultivation of creativity as employees are dissuaded from proposing new ideas because they expect they will be met with ‘business-as-usual’ resistance.

In addition to the above-mentioned disadvantages, a top-down training methodology also tends to stagnate the pool of talent an organization can draw on to improve training. And critically, top-down approaches often lack built-in mechanisms to ensure employees are both trained and competent in their job functions. In essence, it is the difference between employees being taught how to push a button and actually applying valuable lessons in their day-to-day responsibilities in order to fulfill an organizational goal.

With the right metrics, evaluation tools and feedback mechanisms, either approach can be used to positive effect. But in the 21st century’s economic climate of increasing innovation, creativity and competition, the top-down approach is beginning to show its age.

For more on how to adopt an effective training methodology, check out Cultivating Competence: Leveraging Training Tools for Measurable Results, an Intelex white paper.

Mission Well Services commits to proactive safety management with Intelex

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

In a world of reactive management, where many companies let accidents occur instead of taking proactive measures to ensure they don’t occur, Mission Well Services is setting a new standard.

Though it has been in business for just under a year, Mission Well Services, a hydraulic fracturing company based in South Texas and serving the oil and gas industry, has already turned to Intelex Technologies to implement a comprehensive, streamlined safety management system.

Get the full story in our Press Room.

Is a software-based EMS the only way to effectively improve sustainability performance?

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

Monitoring environmental impacts by tracking sustainability KPIs is essential for any business that wants to improve or report on environmental performance. But, from a financial perspective, how these environmental metrics are tracked is as important as the fact they are tracked. Results increasingly show a software-based EMS is the most effective way of improving environmental performance and boosting revenue.

Environmental management has been overcomplicated in recent years, and business leaders often feel overwhelmed by the perceived array of complex requirements associated with environmental performance. But it is actually quite simple. On a rudimentary level, it involves tracking and reporting on four critical metrics: waste and wastewater output, water usage, and air emissions. After analyzing these factors, a business can develop and implement new policies to mitigate its environmental impacts and save money.

But the most substantial savings of environment management arises from the implementation of a software-based EMS. The return on investment (ROI) from a system that tracks, analyzes and reports on all of the metrics associated with your environment program can be enormous, and manifests in a number of ways:

Efficiency: Environment management personnel commit a substantial amount of time and effort to basic tasks, including the collection, assessment and reporting of environmental data. These are all elements of an environment program that can be streamlined through software. For example, consider all the time an environment manager or full-time equivalent spends manually inputting data into a traditional spreadsheet program, assessing the data and generating reports based on the data. The right software will allow staff across all locations to input the four critical environmental metrics into a web-based platform and automate the processes of assessing and collecting data.
Risk Avoidance: Often businesses face substantial fines from permit violations as a result of poor management of wastewater output and air emissions. A robust software-based EMS is capable or correlating real-time emissions and wastewater statistics to permit thresholds and issuing automatic email notifications to warn environment management personnel that a permit violation is likely or imminent. This allows a business to proactively manage emissions sources and discharge points to ensure permitted tolerances are not exceeded and costly fines are avoided.
Brand Image: As the world becomes more environment-conscious, the value of a legitimate, environmentally progressive brand image is substantial. But the perception of a progressive environmental agenda is only as effective as the environment program supporting it. A software-based EMS will curb the amount of time spent on the minutiae of managing an environment program, freeing up time for environment managers to focus on improving environmental performance by implementing aggressive sustainability policies. Also, real-time access corporate environment KPIs and live reporting capabilities will enable a resort to prove its environmental performance with current data at any point.

A robust software solution will also provide cost savings associated with continual audit preparedness, the elimination of duplicate data, and the tracking of (and automatic following-up on) corrective actions. Further, environment management software is the most effective and efficient means of implementing and maintaining a robust EMS as well as ensuring continued compliance with regulatory and legislative standards.

To integrate, or not to integrate… Part 4

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

We’ll conclude our discussion on Integrated Management Systems by looking at the supposed ‘Holy Grail’ of business management: a management system that goes many steps further than simply EHS and quality concerns, and is applied across all business lines, even those outside EHS and Quality realms. This would be a truly integrated management system that could cover areas such as corporate governance, sustainability…basically any business processes and activities.

For example, document control, Corporate Social Responsibility, auditing, and training could be governed along the same integrated management standards. According to Robert Pojasek’s 2006 article in Environment Quality Management, one synergistic or ‘umbrella’ system could enable an organization to ensure the quality of its products…and demonstrate that those products are consistent with the organization’s vision, mission, core values and objectives.”

This idea is based on the premise that, by some means or other, all business activities overlap with some other (if not all other) business activities, so rather than treating each consideration as a watertight compartment, apply the same form of a management system across all

The basic integration of ISHQ considerations could open the gateway to a holistic and synergistic approach to all business concerns, but this can be an ambitious and sometimes fruitless endeavour if the business in question is not of a size and scope necessary to warrant facing the logistical challenges demanded by such an organizational shift.

As mentioned, the essential message is that businesses shouldn’t integrate systems for the sake of integration, but rather when a clear business benefit of integration is identified. That said, if the end goal is a seamless, organization-wide management system, keep scalability at the top of your mind as you evaluate management system options, including software solutions.

To integrate, or not to integrate… Part 3

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

For a company over-anxious to reconcile EHS and Quality processes and data, some complications may emerge.

For example, some integrated management opponents argue that strict adherence to one specific set of standards can be sacrificed in the name of integration. That is, in defining a broad-base of widely applicable standards to enforce across all EHS and Quality domains, some details are institutionally enabled to slip through the cracks.

Really, it all depends on what specifically a company is attempting to integrate. For example, getting managers across all departments to employ the same audit checklists and reports can be like mixing apples and oranges. However, leveraging the same auditing software that allows the importing of individual EHS and quality checklists can reduce costs.

The standards governing quality can be far removed from those governing environment, health and safety. However, this notion can be a very particular function of a particular corporate culture and which aspect (of EHS and Quality) has the greatest impact within that corporate culture.

Further, an old paradigm suggests some aspects of environment, health and safety are not tied intrinsically to aspects of quality, such as continual improvement in performance, legislative compliance and considerations of risks.

This has changed somewhat as businesses constantly try to improve their environment, health and safety performance. Historically these concerns have been dominated by legislation, and quality, by and large, has been customer-driven. Now environment, health and safety are being strongly influenced by brand impact, and quality is being influenced by new consumer protection legislation.

Some IMS critics a suggest integrated systems can actually make audits more complex. However, having an IMS places no demand on any company to fulfill a comprehensive EHS and Quality audit each time an audit is conducted. Rather, businesses need to asses where overlap exists and where it makes good business sense to combine elements. We’ll discuss more about this in our conclusion.

To integrate, or not to integrate…

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

Though environment, health, safety (EHS) and quality management issues are often handled by individual management systems, the guiding principles behind each of these areas share a common link — W. Edwards Deming. The American quality guru is most commonly associated with the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, an iterative problem-solving process used to resolve quality issues and improve business performance. But it is important to remember the foremost EHS and quality management standards — including ISO14001 (environment), OSHAS 18000 (health and safety) and ISO 9001 (quality) — are all rooted in the PDCA or Deming Cycle.

Businesses that encounter regular overlap between these areas ought to consider the potential benefits of an Integrated Management System (IMS). An IMS coordinates all of an organization’s procedures, systems and processes within one complete framework and, in an ideal scenario, allows the organization to operate as a seamless whole, with unified objectives across all departments.

But a fulsome IMS is not for every company. Any business of any size does not necessarily stand to benefit from adopting an integrated management system. Instead, businesses should integrate management systems not just for the sake of integration, but where there is a clear business benefit that can be tied to integration. The principle benefits of integrated EHS and quality management include both cost-effectiveness and collaboration between intrinsically related EHSQ concerns.

Imagine a business that uses a hypothetical hazardous material in the manufacture of a product at one of its plants and consider how this hazardous material can create near equally significant issues within each EHS and quality realm:

Environment: The hazardous material may be toxic to the environment at large and necessitate consideration within the organization’s air emissions monitoring.
Health and Safety: The same hazardous material may compromise the health or directly endanger the lives of employees in the plant.
Quality: The handling and use of the hazardous material may be governed explicitly by existing quality standards.

As an example, consider last year’s string of recalls associated with the cadmium content in children’s toys manufactured in China. The extended direct exposure of factory workers to the highly toxic heavy metal would necessitate an internal health and safety policy governing safe exposure and use. Also, given the targeted end user of the toys are children, quality management mechanisms would have to ensure the cadmium content of the toys did not exceed federally regulated maximums affecting the markets in which the product would be sold. But further, since improperly disposed cadmium is known to leech into and contaminate groundwater, provisions would have to be put into place to ensure proper disposal of the material at the plant level.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss the pros and cons of implementing an IMS.

Sustainability reporting, minus the burden of reporting

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

Thinking of reporting on your sustainability efforts through an outlet like the GRI? Good for you.

That said, you may have encountered some opposition to the premise, or criticisms highlighted by Corporate Social Responsibility guru Mallen Baker, who has pointed to an oft-cited flaw in the GRI approach, namely the fact a report is essentially a company’s own narrative of its sustainability performance.

“All the current models of reporting expect the companies to provide their own narrative — to tell the story complete,” he noted on his blog. “And yet that doesn’t work, because the end user actually doesn’t read the reports, and doesn’t trust the company to provide its own context. There are no expert interpreters of this information. All the focus on assurance is about checking data — but that isn’t the real issue. People by and large don’t think the companies will lie about the data — but they fully expect them to paint the best gloss on what the data actually means.”

Yet, somewhere between GRI and friends’ overzealous focus on reporting standards and the noble spirit of making sustainability reporting as comprehensive and transparent as financial reporting, there is a golden mean that is arguably more passive, less resource-intensive, and — quite appropriately — completely sustainable. Businesses that implement a streamlined, electronic EMS featuring configurable reporting capabilities and real-time dashboards stand to benefit from two critical advantages.

Firstly, if all sustainability metrics are monitored and inputted across all business units on an ongoing basis and rolled up across administrative levels, much of the time spent measuring, collecting and analyzing data and generating reports that comply with reporting models will be eliminated. The time and effort associated with generating comprehensive sustainability reports has been a major gripe among participant organizations and critics, and a streamlined, software-based reporting process curbs the time and manpower required.

Secondly, with real-time dashboards indicating the status of sustainability KPIs (GHG emissions, for example), an organization is able to monitor the pulse of its sustainability performance and gauge the impact of new initiatives. In essence, instead of gauging and reporting on sustainability performance on an annual basis, an organization real-time dashboards and integrated reporting capabilities provide a means of perpetual monitoring and reporting.

Intelex’s essential ROI guide featured in Pollution Engineering

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

Ever have a tough time selling a software solution to your boss you know will make a huge difference to your organization?

Well, this isn’t an uncommon thing. It’s always difficult to convince those that hold the purse strings in any organization to loose themselves of the funds you so dearly need to streamline your processes; to escape the Notes, the spreadsheets, and the disparate documents and systems of the world to reconcile all information in one system.

If these concerns echo with you at all, check out a recent article in Pollution Engineering, penned by Intelex’s Paul Leavoy.

It describes the opportunities and challenges that face any EHS manager as he or her pursues the approval of senior management’s approval of a software solution that will help streamline processes and generate ROI.

Let us know what you think!

Head of Intelex recognized by peer CEO group for leadership

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

We Intelexians couldn’t be more proud of our President and CEO Mark Jaine.

AceTech Ontario, a group of more than 50 CEOs in the technology sector, handed Mark a unique leadership award during its annual retreat in Ontario’s Blue Mountains last week. Four CEOs in the organization were recognized for their leadership and accomplishments. Mark was singled out for an aggressive and highly successful sales and marketing strategy.

“It is truly humbling to receive this unique award from a network of peers that I both respect and admire,” Mark said in response to receiving the award. “I have learned so much through my participation with AceTech Ontario over the years, so it is a great honour to be recognized in this way.”

Head over to our press room for more information about this significant accomplishment.

Congratulations, Mark!