Stop Issues Recurring by Retraining?

“That issue has happened again! We really need to improve the awareness of our staff – anyone who has not used the right format needs to be retrained. We can’t tolerate sloppy work. People just need to concentrate and do the job right!”

You may recall a previous post about human factors where I looked at why people make errors and the different types of errors. If the error was a slip (a type of action error where someone planned to do the right thing but did the wrong thing) then retraining won’t help. The person already knows what the right thing to do is. Similarly if the error was a lapse (where someone forgot to do it). Of course, with both of these error types, making people aware will help temporarily. But over time, they will likely go back to doing what they were doing before unless some other change is made.

If the error was a rule-based thinking error where the knowledge is there but was misapplied, it is unlikely that retraining will work long term. We would need to understand the situation and why it is that the knowledge was misapplied. If the date is written in American format but read as European (3/8/18 being 8-Mar-2018 rather than 3-Aug-2018) then can we change the date format to be unambiguous in the form dd-mmm-yyyy (03-Aug-2018)?

What if the error is a non-compliance? If someone didn’t carry out the full procedure because they were rushed and they get retrained, do we really think that in the future when they are rushed they are going to do something different? They might do short term but longer term it is unlikely.

For all these errors, retraining or awareness might help short term but they are unlikely to make a difference longer term. To fix the issue longer term, we need to understand better why the error occurred and focus on trying to stop its recurrence by changes to process/systems.

A thinking error that is knowledge-based is different though. If someone made an error because they don’t know what they should be doing then clearly providing training and improving their knowledge should help. But even here, “retraining” is the wrong action. It implies they have already been trained and if so, the question is, why didn’t that training work? Giving them the same training again is likely to fail unless we understand what went wrong the first time. We need to learn from the failure in the training process and fix that.

Of course, this does not mean that training is not important. It is vital. Processes are least likely to have errors when they are designed to be as simple as possible and are run by well-trained people. When there are errors, making sure people know that they can happen is useful and will help short term but it is not a long term fix (corrective action). Longer term fixes need a better understanding of why the error(s) occurred and this is where the individuals running the process can be of vital help. As long as there is a no-blame culture (see previous post) you can work with those doing the work to make improvements and help stop the same errors recurring. Retraining is not the answer and it can actually have a negative impact. We want those doing the work to come forward with errors so we can understand them better, improve the process/system and reduce the likelihood of them happening again. If you came forward acknowledging an error you had made and were then made to retake an hour of on-line training on a topic you already know, how likely would you be to come forward a second time? Retraining can be seen as a punishment.

So, to go back to the post title “Stop errors recurring by retraining?” No, that won’t work. Retraining is never a good corrective action.

What about that other corrective action that comes up again and again – more QC? That’s the subject of a future post.

Text: © 2018 Dorricott MPI Ltd. All rights reserved.