A friend of mine oversees training for a large company.  During a recent phone call he told me of how an accident at his company was deemed a “training problem.”

This malady afflicts many companies. “Something is wrong — let’s blame the training department.”

Perhaps it would be more mature … more responsible … for these companies to stop and think before they blame?

For example, here was the situation at my friend’s company:

(The story, as it was relayed to me)

A relatively new hire was assigned the task of cleaning a certain chemical tank. Who made the assignment? The employee’s supervisor.

The supervisor is well aware that cleaning that tank requires special training for how to work with the chemicals stored in that tank.

When the employee was injured and caused some damage to the system he was working on, it was discovered that the employee was not trained on that equipment — and it was immediately deemed a “training problem.”

I don’t think so.

Sounds more like a Supervisory Problem to me. Here is a supervisor who KNOWS special training is required to work on that equipment, and doesn’t bother to check –or even ask– if the new hire had attended any such training.

In my opinion this supervisor needs a reprimand and the training department needs to be exonerated.

From my experience, most training departments would love to see all employees trained appropriately.  Likewise, most managers and supervisors would rather skip the training and just keep those new hires out there producing …

That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it, supervisors? 

Production, production, production? 

Never mind that someone gets hurt. Your production numbers are more important.

Like I said, it’d be nice for supervisors to do more big picture thinking and take responsibility instead of looking for someone to blame when things don’t go their way.

Try it, guys. It seems counter-intuitive, but it just might earn you some respect.

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Filed in Work, Business, Training, Management, Workplace, Corporate Culture