In this episode, we discuss how to effectively implement training into the work process without sacrificing profitability.
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Transcript
Phil Zito 0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito episode 334 IT folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to episode 334 of the smart buildings Academy podcast. In this episode, we're
Phil Zito 0:13
going to talk about how to incorporate training with work while staying profitable. Everything we discussed today can be found at podcast at smart buildings academy.com For slash 334. Once again, that is podcasts at smart buildings academy.com four slash 334. And if you find this podcast beneficial, definitely ask that you go to iTunes, leave a five star rating and review and or like and subscribe to this channel, wherever you're listening to this podcast. Alright, so I was on a call today debriefing with some managers from our workforce development program. And we were talking about how do they incorporate training with their work, and not just tank a job. Because here's the deal, you could take someone who needs to learn a skill, and you can put them on a job. And you can quote unquote train them. But those often tend to be double whammy scenarios. Because what will happen is your senior technician, the person who is running the job, or is the lead tech on the job, that person is now splitting their profitability between training this employee who is probably operating at 20 30% efficiency and working on their daily work. So now you've got this high paid senior technician who probably is not trained on how to train people. And they are sitting there trying to train this person oversees Oh J T, as well as work on a project and then you've got this person on the project, who potentially is not being efficient. So it's kind of a double whammy when it comes to a profit hit. You know, you'd be better off if you didn't put this person on the job. Because ultimately, yeah, you may be generating more revenue, but you're not generating profit. So how in the world can you train people when a lot of what we do requires, you know, hands on work, while not taking your jobs. And this has been a problem that our company has been noodling on. And I believe we have the solution. And while we definitely have a product, like everything that you all can buy that will solve this, I want to talk to you about how to do it yourself. Okay. So the first things first, when most people try to implement some form of OJT or incorporate training with job work, what they tend to do is they take this Omni Bus unstructured approach, they think back to what did I need to know as a technician? Or what did I typically do? And that's if they're thinking, sometimes they're not even thinking at all. They're just saying, Oh, crap, we're behind on this job. Let's take these two new hires we've got and let's stick them out on the project. And whatever the senior tech needs, that senior tech can have those people do. And while that is the most inefficient way of doing things, that is the reality as to how a lot of people do things. So what can we do to fix that? Well, first, we have to separate from the premise that we're just going to put someone out there, and that there's no way of structuring this training, and that we just have to accept that people are going to be inefficient. And we're going to have a decrease in efficiency. I'm going to start with the premise that we can actually implement training in project work, and we could do it profitably. And we can have a net profit with the project while doing it. So how do we do that? Well, the first thing we have to do goes back to I believe it was last week's episode, it may have been the week before, where we were talking about doing a job tasks breakdown. So in order for us to do any form of training, and to tie that training to OJ T, is it requires us to have a job task breakdown. So like I said, just recapping real quickly from the previous podcast, we take a job description, we do a job task breakdown, we figure out what tasks contribute the most to profit and to project execution. And then those are the tasks we're going to train and focus on. Now, when we want to go and incorporate trading with work and we want to stay profitable, then we need to be able to one target work opportunities that have enough of the work that we can quickly train someone to do to a average level of performance. See that then they can use that performance on the job to kind of take them from average to above average to excellent performance. Just for metrics sake, average performance would be 50% effectiveness, above average would be 75%. effectiveness. And excellent performance would be 90 to 95% effectiveness measured in estimated versus actual executed hours allocated to a task. So, for example, if you have someone, and you've estimated four hours for a VAV box, but they take eight, that is a 50%, effectiveness, right, because they're 50% off. And so right there, if we are able to go and improve that to six hours, that is now 75% effectiveness. And if we're able to improve it to like 4.25 hours, that is now a 90 to 95% effectiveness. So those are the metrics we're going to use when I talk about using metrics. Okay, so we've went, and we've laid out this framework, and we've said, we're gonna have our job task breakdowns, and we're going to identify jobs that have the tasks that we're looking for. So this is a combination of having processes, having procedures, and having job tasks. So job tasks we've broken out, like I mentioned in previous episode, proud, proud, oh, my goodness, cannot speak processes and procedures, we're going to break out in this one. So you should have for example, using this VAV box example, again, we should have a process for doing VAV box installation. And we should have a procedure, the big difference between a process and a procedure is a process is kind of high level, whereas a procedure is going to be step by step. So what you're going to do is you're going to train on the procedure, and you're going to have them implement the process, which is a list of procedures. So for example, our list of procedures for the VAV box install may be going and mounting the controller, that may be a procedure, just mounting the controller is a procedure, it is part of a larger process. So the larger process is that we are going to go and let me kind of show you how we do this real quick. I realize some of you are not going to be able to see this, because you are listening, that's fine, I will try to take some screenshots and send this over to you. But what I'm going to do right here is I'm going to open up my favorite software. And so I'm going to switch sharing over here to my favorite software. And we're gonna see that right now.
Phil Zito 7:48
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to say okay, Vav, box, install process. And then what I would do is I would have a procedure for each one, I would say, okay, Vav controller, mounting procedure. And this procedure may include like the pedo tube, right pedo tube, maybe it includes power, mount, power wiring, maybe it includes combis connection. These are all things, maybe it also includes, you know, the upper shaft mounting. So this is in our procedure, so we've got our procedure, and then maybe we have another procedure, which is vav controller, network setup. And then maybe we have another one which is Vav, controller, Device Configuration. Then maybe we have another one which is vav controller, TB, or TMB test imbalance. So for network setup, maybe we got to set MAC address set that we need to do network discovery. Maybe we need to do point mapping. No. And maybe for our device configuration, download program. Maybe it's point assignment. Right. So we're doing all these things, and we're coming up with these procedures. Now I know you're saying to yourself, Phil, this isn't our procedure. I mean, what we would ultimately do is you know, I would open up a Word file and I would take this you know, Vav controller. This is what we do for companies we help them create this kind of stuff vav controller mounting procedure. And we were you know Take controller mount horizontally using applied vav controller hardware, I'm just totally spitballing on this. And then we would have like a little video, and it would show someone doing just that little piece. And then it would be, you know, okay, we've got that connect pedo tubing to vav into our goal airflow sensor. And then it would be, you know, a diagram or some little, you know, screenshot or something like that, we would do this and this thing right here, we get stored on like a SharePoint site, or on some sort of website. And then the technician would be able to go and pull these with their associated videos, and we'd be able to watch all these procedures. And then the process would be another document that would be labeled, and it'd be boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and you would have a procedure for each process. And now you have this person, and maybe there's 1000 vav boxes on this project. And they go, and they follow this process. And by the time they've done 1000, Vav boxes, they within the first 100 vav boxes, they're going to go from probably 50 to 75% efficiency, you see that 25 Per, you see that average, to above average proficiency gain, that happens pretty quickly. But it's the above average to excellent, that's the one that takes a little bit longer. But if you can get somebody who's 75% efficient at doing vav boxes, and they are brand new to the field, and you're paying them maybe 40 50,000 a year, that is potentially and you'd have to crunch the math, that is potentially a better payoff than a senior tech who's 90% efficient, but you're paying them 90 to 110 a year. I mean, if we crunched the numbers here, like if I bring up calculator, and I do you know, 40,000 times point seven, five, that's 30,000. Right? So we're losing 10,000. But we're keeping
Phil Zito 12:38
30,000. Now, if I go again, and I take someone who is 110,000. So if I do this 110. And we do 90% efficient, yo, it's basically the same loss, right? With the brand new technician, you've got a $10,000 loss. And with a senior technician, you've got a $10,000 loss. But the senior technician is doing much less, you know, detailed and difficult work, it's much easier to train up a brand new technician to do a VAV box install than it is to go and find someone who can do complex central utility plant programming, right. But you can use this same process here. And this is what's so powerful, is you can use the same process again and again, you go and you create an install process. You create the procedures, you train in house quickly, like we discussed in previous episodes. And you document these procedures and you videotape the training, and you create this procedure document. And then you have them execute this in the field. But this is just vav boxes, right? You could do this for design, you could do this for programming, you could do this for troubleshooting, you can create literal processes and procedures for almost anything. Now the trick is, where do you go and put your dollars? You know, when do you decide that you want to go and put your dollars to a specific process development. And this is why I highly recommend you do job task analysis and you measure job tasks. If you notice that you have a huge inefficiency in your install job tasks in focusing on your install processes, and getting those trained up and developed is going to be very effective. For example, if you have you know 70% efficiency on install tasks, but 90% efficiency on programming tasks, then it makes no sense to go and work on programming tasks. It makes sense to work on install tasks. But what I tend to find is because a lot of organizations do not have the skills to evaluate these men, that's why they turned to us is what I find is that the organizations tend to apply an equal weight to every task. Actually, sometimes they apply an unequal weight to tasks based on perceived exertion or biases. Now what do I mean by that? So a perceived exertion is going to be I perceive programming to be much harder, and I perceive it to be much higher skill. Therefore, it needs more training focus, when in actuality, if you followed any of our programming and programming podcasts, or our programming videos, you realize that programming is nothing but a series of processes of implementing the correct design patterns. Based on what you're reading in the sequence, it can actually be quite easy. I know that sacrilege to say, but it is what it is. Now, what do I mean by biases, because biases is, especially in this day, and age is a hugely loaded term. What I mean by that is, if you've always been a programmer, and you moved into ops management, and you're always a programmer, then quite often your bias is going to be that the program, or programming is where you should focus. But if you came from the field as an installer, installation is going to be where you're biased, you're going to focus on installation. So the ability to go and be aware of that perceived exertion. And that bias at the same time is going to help you that's why getting very clear on metrics. You know, I was talking to my director of sales today. And we're talking about sales performance, and how can we measure the performance of our sales team. And we're talking about taking emotions, biases and beliefs out of it and dealing with facts. And you deal with facts with numbers, things that you can quantitate. So by using job tasks, by measuring job tasks, and doing post mortems on projects, based on this job task codes, you can see where the deviations exist. So this becomes a very important way of measuring performance. Once you've measured performance, then it is simply a matter of implementing processes. So to recap, on implementing these processes, what you need to do is you need to agenda, identify job task breakdowns, from your job descriptions. Once you've done that, then you need to go and you need to say, okay, these are the metrics, we're going to measure these job tasks by start measuring them and within, you know, a good summer season, you should have a pretty good idea on performance. Once you have an idea on performance, then you can go and say okay, if we improved this job task or that job task, it would have a disproportionate result. And that's the key, right? If you notice that you've got 30% efficiency on vav boxes, but 80% efficiency on plant design, then it may make sense based on how many vav boxes are on jobs to implement a VAV box training program, of which you decide on your company's internal process, I would argue that there are two VAV box installed processes. There's a VAV box install process for factory mounted package, or factory mounted vav controls. And there's a VAV box installed process for non factory mounted VAV box controls. So you develop those two processes. And with those two processes, you develop procedures, realizing that a lot of the procedures are going to overlap. For example, the VAV controller network setup procedure, the VAV controller device configuration procedure, and the VAV controller test and balanced procedure are going to overlap whether it is a factory installed vav controller or a non factory. So field installed vav controller. But if you take that 30%, and you're able to increase it to 75% efficiency that is much greater than increasing that central plant, which may arguably I would agree is more complex, but at the same time there's less of them and increasing that by 10% efficiency is not going to have near the payoff. And that's where a lot of these people make mistakes with their training. They just simply look at okay, I'm going to take this OEM class, or we're going to do a generic training and they don't tie it to performance, tie it to performance, measure the data, look for the low light, the low hanging fruit, grab that low hanging fruit increases efficiency using a process and procedures and then you're going to see dramatic growth in your profitability, which with profitable profitability growths, as long as you're not taking huge owner drawers then you should be being able to reinvest that cash flow into the business, thus growing the business substantially. I have a sneaking suspicion that with the way the economy is going, the need to evaluate processes and really squeezed efficiency out of every opportunity we have is going to be a primary focus and those of you that are ahead of the curve that are focusing on process efficiency are going to be in a much better place when starts to when stuff starts to contract and get tight. Alright folks, as always, if you have any questions do not hesitate to reach out to us. Like I mentioned, this is a service we do provide and assist our customers with feel free to learn more by contacting us you can read about everything we discuss here at pockets that smart business academy.com Ford slash 334 once again that is podcasts that smart buildings academy.com Ford slash 334 If you find these episodes helpful, please like and subscribe and or comment and rate depending on where you're listening to and or watching these episodes. Thanks so much for being here. I believe coming up let me take a look. But I believe coming up later this week, we are going to be having that MQ TT podcast episode. Let me take a look. It looks like yeah, that's coming up MQ TT. Additionally, we're going to be going through Discovering your customers decision making process. That's going to be freakin amazing because I run into so many people who can't really find out if this person is a buyer and why they buy. We're going to talk about five tips for implementing talent management strategy. Next Monday, we're going to be talking about cost savings between proportional and floating control. And then we're going to be talking about identifying true sales opportunities, pain points and needs. And that'll be next Friday, not this Friday, but next Friday. So we got a lot coming down the pipe. Thank you all for being here. And I look forward to talking to all of you every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 2pm. I know we've missed a couple. I apologize for that. That's 2pm Pacific time.
Phil Zito 22:20
It's just been crazy. insanely busy here. So thanks so much for your understanding. I look forward to talking to you all every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Thanks a ton and take care
