Blast Inefficiency With These Magic Bullets (Part 1)

• make instant experts out of people on your team?
• dispense with long training classes?
• increase consistency in completing forms and procedures?
• assure compliance with quality standards?
• get new workers producing on the job fast?

What if you could do all this without taking big chunks out of your budget? Sound like magic? Here's how you can be the magician: Use job aids to resolve gaps in knowledge and skills.

Job aids are magic bullets that go straight to the heart of performance problems. Simply put, a job aid is any document (or application) that assists a worker to complete a task or a series of tasks. Job aids provide the guidance needed and only the guidance that is needed. They are role-specific and task-specific.

You've seen them before: the quick reference guide listing features and functions that you can pull out of software manuals; tip sheets; dialogue boxes; the instructions on hotel phones. They can be laminated sheets of paper, sticky notes on your computer, a document in a Lotus Notes database, a MS Word template. Job aids list key information in its most elemental form.

Job aids can replace most or all of traditional classroom courses, which require "training to memory," a time-consuming, expensive investment in resources. In an operation where high turnover is commonplace, job aids can provide surprising savings by …