Onboarding sets the stage for an employee’s experience within an organization.  Done well, onboarding gives a new employee all the tools and information needed to succeed in a new role.  Done poorly, incompletely, or totally ignored (all too common!), an employee can be set on a path of chronic frustration and underperformance.  The positive or negative effects generated by the onboarding process – or lack thereof – are experienced by both the employee and the employer or manager.  Thus, it is beneficial to the organization and all individuals within it to have a thorough and effective onboarding process.
     Thorough onboarding of a new employee consists of many elements and varies according to the role of the employee and the nature of the organization.  This post focuses on one element in a specific context:  the Production Associate Training Plan.  The Skills Gap Fallacy – Part 3:  Skills Gap Assessment and Closure outlines a seven-step process to create the skilled workforce your organization needs; step six is develop a plan to achieve the “future state.”  Training Plan Development via Task Assessment is one tool that can be used to accomplish this.

     For a coherent discussion of culture to take place, it is important to define the term in its intended context.  Social psychologist Goodwin Watson referred to ‘culture’ as “the total way of life characteristic of a somewhat homogeneous society of human beings,” differentiating its use in social science from the vernacular “refinement of taste in intellectual and aesthetic realms.”
     Watson also quotes anthropologist Ralph Linton’s definition of ‘culture’ as “the configuration of learned behavior whose component elements are shared and transmitted by the members of a particular society.”
     Key components of each definition will help us translate the concept of culture from a discussion of at-large society to one of a corporate environment.

     Many manufacturing and service companies succumb to competitive pressure by embarking on misguided cost-reduction efforts, failing to take a holistic approach.  To be clear, lean is the way to be; lean is not the same as cost reduction.  Successful cost-reduction efforts consider the entire enterprise, the entire product life cycle, and, most importantly, the effects that changes will make on customers.