I was talking with a friend 
at work when she revealed to me that she had a “Job Aid Box.” See the photo. The box contains her hard-to-remember-(work related)-notes-to-herself.
There are so many things I love about this discovery. This colleague is an excellent performer. Most of her Job Aids are brief notes containing useful bits of knowledge; who is the one person in the company who handles XYZ transactions, where is the place to go for tracking ABC. All of these pieces of knowledge were verified through experience, outside the official knowledge management tools in place. Her “Job Aids” were brief and targeted to her specific needs. I also loved that the Aids were placed in a physical box. It’s not a tech-strategy, but I see similarities between placing your hard to remember Job Aids in a box and placing notes in your PDA. They are different boxes, but still functioning as storage mechanisms. The very tangible nature of the box reminded me of Rossett’s statement, “[Job Aids] relieve individuals of responsibility for storing information in long term memory.” Outsourcing of memory in a way….
Self directed learning displayed in the workplace, without the aid of technology and formal learning = brilliant little piece of learning for me.
Not too sure about the play-doh bits though!
“Job aids, like their automated siblings, relieve individuals of responsibility for storing information in long term memory….Reliance on Job Aids shifts the individual’s obligation from repetition over time to searching for information as needed.” “Today’s knowledge warriors are too busy for courses.”
-Allison Rossett and Lisa Schafer from Job Aids & Performance Support, Moving from the Knowledge in the Classroom to Knowledge Everywhere
I just finished Rossett & Schafer’s book. The book started off rather slowly, but I appreciated it by the end of the experience. The book sets job aids in the context of corporate learning that is moving towards a performance culture. They develop a model for “Planner and Sidekick Performance Supports.”
While I appreciate the examples in this portion of the book (the authors provide a variety of job aids & performance support), the distinction between planners and sidekicks sometimes blurred.
It was the last one third of the book which most interested me. Here the authors place job aids (planners and sidekicks) into the context of a performance support culture. They identify 8 principles for performance support:
- It is tied to achievement of important business objectives
- Focuses on what differentiates great performance
- Delivers the help people need
- Provides what is needed, no more, no less (fine lines!)
- Speaks the language of the worker
- Helps people collaborate and view work for multiple perspectives
- Helps people act smarter than they are
- Helps users define, track or achieve goals
The authors then compare performance support to a change management.
Placing supports in the context of performance helped me to better get my head around what is meant by performance culture.
Two ideas that struck me from the reading:
- We are moving towards self-directed learning in all types of organizations; corporate and educational.
- Smart design of systems and user interfaces (ie: usability) is huge and will continue to be huge factor in improving performance. However, I’m not sure that smart developers wouldn’t work directly with end users (not via performance consultants) when designing such systems. It seems the end users are the primary source in the story. I wonder if more could not be gained by working directly with top performing employees rather than through a mediated relationship – in the design of smart systems.