Chapter 8
Nonlearning Interventions: Environmental
This chapter
opens with an introduction to the range of environmental factors that affect human performance at work
focuses on three of the most influential environmental interventions and describes how you can create and implement them
guides you and your WLP team in identifying those gaps within your organization for which each intervention would be appropriate.
Tools in this chapter include
information charts for three types of environmental interventions: expectation setting, feedback systems, and task interference elimination.
The Environment and Its Impact on Human Performance at Work
In the discussion of Gilbert's Behavior Engineering Model, which we presented in Training Ain't Performance(pp. 38-41) and revisited in Chapter 4 of this Fieldbook, you learned that approximately 70 to 80 percent of the factors affecting people's performance at work were environmentally based, rather than individually based. The logical conclusion to draw is that you have to begin with the environmental factors if you are going to change or improve performance.
As a performance professional, you can apply Gilbert's, Harless', or Rummler and Brache's model to identify influential environmental factors. No matter what their classification scheme—or anyone else's for that matter—you will have to consider the following five dimensions of the workplace environment: physical, social-cultural, work systems and processes, management, and psychological.
The Physical Dimension
In the 19th century most industrial workplaces were dismal and dangerous. Work sites were designed to accommodate the new machines of the industrial revolution, not the people. Machine productivity was the overriding concern, so workers and their managers had to perform under dreadful conditions and for long hours—as many as 75 hours weekly. The atmosphere in these environments was often foul and unhealthy. As a consequence there were frequent illnesses, injuries, and deaths from unshielded machinery and contaminated material.
Our modern work settings are far from that hideous past. With the steady increase in the valuing of human capital and the major achievements being derived from knowledge work as opposed to physical labor, the new work environment has been redesigned to foster mental output. This has given rise to the fields of ergonomics, industrial architecture, and environmental design that not only make for pleasant working conditions but also foster greater human productivity. Although as a performance professional you are not a workplace designer, you still can intervene at the physical environmental level to improve performance. Table 8-1 lists some physical environmental factors that affect workplace performance and suggests some ways in which you may intervene.
The entries in Table 8-1 are only indicative of some of the possible physical factors that can affect performance and the appropriate potential interventions. Numerous physical factors abound. Be on the lookout for these as sources of inadequate—or potentially insufficient—performance.
The Social-Cultural Dimension
One of the most dangerous things a performance professional can do is rely on her or his own sense of what it right or wrong when dealing with new workplace environments. Our personal perceptions can be quite misleading with respect to what is occurring. Here is an illustration from an actual case.
Supervisory Abuse
Jessica had recently graduated from the university in her country's capital and was delighted to obtain a position with a pharmaceutical firm upcountry, several hundred miles from the university and her home. The child of a prosperous, educated, and well-traveled family, Jessica was proud that she would be financially independent and on the path to a career as a human resources/ training professional.
At the plant to which she was assigned, her job was to ensure adequate training and performance support for manufacturing personnel. She soon noticed that supervisors frequently shouted at assembly-line workers and packers. She was horrified and determined to eliminate this vile practice.
Fortunately, a mentor interceded before her outraged enthusiasm drove her too far. He encouraged her to go into the plant and spend a week working on the line. Wonderful advice, as Jessica soon discovered that in this unfamiliar cultural climate, things were not quite as they appeared to her. True, supervisors shouted at the workers as they strutted about very seriously noting inadequacies and errors. However, as the workers pointed out to Jessica, this was to show that the supervisors were taking their jobs seriously. The shouting demonstrated conscientiousness and authority. The workers paid absolutely no attention to the supervisors and their noisy displays. Everything was fine.
Table 8-1. Physical Environmental Factors and Potential Interventions for the Performance Professional
| Physical Environmental Factor | Potential Interventions |
| Uncomfortable work space or physical surroundings |
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| Noise and visual distractions |
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| Inadequate lighting |
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| Inadequate access to required resources or materials |
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| Poorly adapted tools and equipment |
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| Environmental threats to safety |
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| Difficulties getting to the work site on time (for example, distance, barriers, traffic) |
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| Health and wellness issues |
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In a study in which one of this Fieldbooks authors participated, a structured on-the-job performance improvement program was developed for new brewery workers in Cameroon, West Africa. The program was based on successful practices and models developed in the United States. What soon became evident was that the socialcultural assumptions and understandings in the United States are not the same as those in Cameroon, and a great deal of program adaptation was necessary. Table 8-2 provides some examples of major social-cultural differences between the two nations.
What Table 8-2 illustrates is that the performance professional must carefully observe and gather a great deal of social-cultural information in unfamiliar settings. Our advice is to observe, gather information from credible sources, create hypotheses, and then verify and reverify your perceptions and understandings before making recommendations or taking actions. To ignore the social-cultural dimensions of a work environment is to decrease the likelihood of achieving performance improvement success.
Table 8-2. Sample Social-Cultural Differences in Setting Up an SOJT Program: Cameroon Contrasted with the United States
| United States | Cameroon |
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The Work Systems and Process Dimension
There is a huge body of literature on the design of work systems and even more on work processes. The complexities of the two areas are beyond the scope of this Fieldbook, but it is essential that you understand the nature of your clients' work systems—how they operate, interconnect, and are monitored. Asking for nontechnical descriptions of how the work gets done in a work unit can help you understand the operation, whether it is as simple as selling coffee or as complex as monitoring a nuclear power plant. As you form a mental model of the work system, investigate and test your understanding. The more closely your vision of how the work gets done matches reality, the more likely it is that you will be able to spot inhibiting factors or weak spots and then identify means for overcoming them.
What is true of work systems is equally true of work processes. Finding out how the work gets done often enables you to identify blockages, points of disconnection, or inefficiencies. In one of our projects to decrease billing errors in a railway company, we tracked the entire process of transporting goods by train. In analyzing and detailing the process, we uncovered numerous points at which errors could be (and were) made. Based on the findings, the process by which goods are transported, tracked, and charged for underwent a dramatic redesign.
On a lighter note, here is a description of an actual project for improving performance in the distribution center of a national retailer:
Look! I'm a Piece of Merchandise
Note: The following is a true story. We strongly recommend that you not follow Shirley's example, although it does give a new meaning to the performance professional becoming intimately familiar with the client's process.
A woman we'll call Shirley is an eager and enthusiastic performance consultant. She wants to understand at a deep level what her clients do and how they do it. Her new assignment was to help improve performance in a highly automated retail distribution center where items are stored until needed and then shipped off to several hundred stores.
With the silent collaboration of a team of distribution center workers, Shirley decided that the best way for her to understand the entire process was to experience it as an item of merchandise. So one morning, dressed in overalls and a hardhat, she was picked up at a supplier site, loaded into the trailer of an 18-wheeler, delivered to the distribution center, and then unloaded onto a pallet. She was wrapped in plastic and sent off on an automated path to be labeled with a bar code. Firmly attached to her automated pallet, she was moved to an assigned storage location, automatically hoisted into the air with grapples, and shunted into a storage bin 40 feet above the ground. A short time later she and her pallet were lifted out of the bin, lowered to the ground, and sent to a loading dock where they were raised by forklift onto a truck and eventually delivered to a store several miles away.
The eight-hour episode was immensely dramatic for Shirley. As she put it, “I now understand the distribution process in a far more meaningful and personal way than before I undertook this adventure.”
The Management Dimension
Geary Rummler and Alan Brache (1995) certainly knew with whom they were dealing when they wrote about managing the white space in the organization chart. So much of what goes on in organizations does not appear in the neat boxes displaying the management hierarchy and formal reporting relationships. Here are some examples:
“The way we do things around here.” This is a useful definition for cultural norms. The performance professional must quickly figure out who is really allowed to speak to whom, what constitutes the informal pecking order, who facilitates and who blocks whether something is done. Not all apparently equal managers are equal in fact.
Informal leadership. Someone may have the official title of decision maker, but often desired performance changes hang in limbo until influential individuals give their unofficial signal that these are acceptable. The person signaling may possess no formal title but wield a great deal of informal decision power.
Organizational language. In many organizations management signals its true level of commitment through coded words that everyone implicitly understands. Is a message sent to please regulators or shareholders, or because the desired performance is really one that people are expected to implement? As a performance professional, you must discover and sort through these environmental codes to determine how serious management is about a performance issue and its resolution. Table 8-3 provides a few examples of code.
Management sponsorship/championing. The person who sponsors or champions an initiative makes a huge difference in the level of support it receives as well as the probable success of its implementation. Here are three rules of thumb with respect to sponsorship/championing:
- If there is no senior sponsor or champion, there is a low probability of adoption.
- The more senior line support an initiative receives, the greater the probability of its success.
- A performance improvement initiative that involves multiple levels of management from the start has a higher probability of success than one championed solely by senior management.
The Psychological Dimension
Improving human performance in the workplace ultimately means change. Change often engenders resistance, especially if those directly affected by the change perceive it to be burdensome, difficult, disruptive, not in their best interests, a threat, a flavor of the month, or quite simply a nuisance that disturbs the status quo. This is why the performance professional must be aware of the psychological factors involved in change and, from the start, take actions to decrease the potential for apathy or active resistance. Table 8-4 offers some concrete suggestions for dealing with several of the psychological factors associated with performance improvement/change initiatives.
Table 8-3. Senior Management Statements and Their Meanings
| They Say… | They Mean… |
| “It is expected that all personnel will adhere to regulations as prescribed in Section 3.4 of the Operating Rules.” | “We're getting pressure from inspectors. We have to make this statement to appease them and look as though we're doing something.” |
| “Based on complaints we have been receiving from customers, all customer service agents are henceforth expected to demonstrate empathy and caring service in their interface with customers in order to ensure both efficiency and satisfaction.” | “Be nice within the 300 seconds you are allotted per customer call.” |
| “Product knowledge and effective demonstration are keys to successful sales. We will be monitoring enrollments and test scores in the product knowledge and demo workshops. If you have not participated in a training workshop and/or you do not achieve a 90 percent test result, you will be called in for counseling and a note will be placed in your file.” | “We're serious about this one. It's important. Don't ignore this message. We mean business.” |
Table 8-4. Negative Perceptions about a Performance Improvement or Change Initiative and Ways to Counteract Them
| Negative Perception | Potential Action |
| “This is bothersome. Who needs it? I've got a lot to do without more changes.” |
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| “Oh my! Whatever they're trying to do means more work for me.” |
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| “This is going to be hard. I'm not sure I'll be able to do it.” |
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| “This change is not in my best interest. It may mean losing my job, losing fellow workers, or hurting my income and career.” |
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| “Another flavor-of-the-month! If I keep my head down and stick to the old ways, this too shall pass.” |
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Putting It All Together
Although this seems like so much to consider and do, it is really not that difficult. As a performance professional you are an agent of change. Professionally speaking, you must be in tune with your surroundings. Considering all of the workplace environmental dimensions described above becomes natural over time. To help you progress in this direction, we propose some activities for you and your team.
An Activity for You
Select a project that you have already completed, are in the process of doing, or with which you are very familiar. Using your knowledge of the project, check off in Worksheet 8-1 the environmental factors that might affect performance. We've left spaces in each environmental dimension for you to add items not included in the worksheet. We're not asking you to do a data-based environmental analysis, but your diligent reflections should identify a few red-flag items and make you more observant of factors that many performance professionals miss.
Now carefully review your worksheet entries. Consider the overall impact on the desired performance improvement initiative if the relevant factors were dealt with.
An Activity for Your WLP Team
Make copies of Worksheet 8-1 on which you wrote your findings and about which you reflected. Distribute them to your team members for discussion. Draw out their observations about the case and then have them work in small groups to examine other projects, using blank copies of Worksheet 8-1. After 30-40 minutes, bring the entire team together to share their observations on the various projects and, more important, to determine what steps the team should take going forward. Add to your growing repertoire of tools a list of potential environmental factors to which WLP team members should pay attention, and some recommended interventions.
Three Major Environmental Interventions
Over the years we have regularly encountered three environmental factors that appear to recur in almost all performance improvement cases. These are (1) lack of clear, specific, and meaningful expectations; (2) lack of timely, useful, and specific feedback; and (3) disruptive task interferences. It's amazing how frequently these performance-killers appear in different settings, individually or in combination. So we'd like to close this chapter with advice for overcoming each of these performance inhibitors.
Setting Clear Expectations
What are they?
Clear expectations are expressions of anticipated behaviors and/or accomplishments to be generated by the performers.
They are a set of clearly defined performances that the performer knows are desired by the organization.
Worksheet 8-1: Analysis of Environmental Factors Affecting Performance
It is understood that the expectations are both achievable, given the skills/ knowledge of the performer and resources/constraints of the environment.
The anticipated behaviors and/or accomplishments are verifiable.
With whom can this intervention be used?
It can be used with populations whose behaviors and/or accomplishments you wish to trigger, improve, or maintain.
It applies to any individual or group. Generally, the more routine and repetitive the job, the more specific and detailed the expectations should be.
What are the components?
The components of clear performance expectations are straightforward. They include
• clearly defined behaviors and/or accomplishments, including performance standards.
• a defined set of rules and/or procedures for communicating performance expectations to the performer. This contains what to communicate, when to communicate, how the communication is conveyed, and who does the communicating.
• a means for verifying that performers comprehend and accept the expectations, or for identifying their concerns.
• a system for monitoring the appropriateness and feasibility of expectations, and a means for adjusting them to organizational conditions.
• a system for verifying attainment of expectations.
How does the intervention work?
Establish performance requirements and standards that are meaningful to the performer and desired by the organization.
Convert performance requirements and standards to statements of expectation.
With sample performers, verify the clarity and lack of ambiguity in the statements of expectation. Revise as appropriate.
Identify who will communicate the expectations and where and when this will occur.
Monitor expectations for appropriateness and feasibility, and revise as necessary.
Verify attainment of expectations.
What rules should be followed in setting performance expectations?
Less is more. Create succinct statements of expectation.
Express expectations in terms and language performers understand.
Provide written copies of the statements of expectation to which performers can refer.
Avoid vague or ambiguous language. Be specific and precise. Define all technical terms and concepts to make sure that everyone is working with a common set of understandings.
To clarify, provide samples or models of desired behaviors and/or accomplishments.
If there are dangers of misinterpretations, provide close-in (that is, almost, but not quite right) non-examples to help performers discriminate between acceptable and unacceptable performance. Make sure that all value-based terms are defined in verifiable ways so that there are organizational meanings attributed to these terms rather than varied individual ones.
Select the most appropriate person and means for communicating expectations. In most cases the immediate supervisor is the best source for communication and clarification of work-related expectations.
Continuously monitor expectations for relevance, feasibility, and certainty that they are not in conflict with other work priorities.
Monitor performance to verify that it conforms to expectations.
Developing Feedback Systems
What are they?
Feedback systems are organized means for providing information about behavior or its effects to an individual or group, with the intention of influencing future performance.
The information provided is deliberate and purposeful and is aimed at influencing behaviors and outcomes in desirable ways.
Appropriately designed, implemented, and delivered feedback increases the probability of having the intended effect on future performance.
Feedback systems have two purposes with respect to influencing future performance: maintain current performance through confirmation (confirming feedback) and change current performance toward desired directions (corrective feedback).
With whom can feedback be used?
You can develop a feedback system for any population whose behaviors and/or accomplishments you wish to maintain or improve.
Feedback systems are appropriate for all individuals and groups at all levels of an organization.
For what type of content can it be used?
All types of content
All types of performance.
What are the components?
Feedback systems contain
• clearly specified behaviors and/or accomplishments, including standards.
• metrics or other defined means or tools for verifying behaviors and/or accomplishments.
• a defined set of rules and/or procedures for communicating feedback on performance to the performer. This includes what to communicate, when to communicate, how the communication is conveyed, and who does the communicating.
How does a feedback system work?
Establish and communicate specific performance objectives and standards that are meaningful to the performer so that the performer knows what is required (clear expectations).
Create means for verifying performance, either through observations, performance monitoring systems, or results checks.
Establish suitable metrics that are quantitative and/or qualitative, as appropriate.
Observe, monitor, and/or verify performance.
Provide unambiguous and timely feedback on performance.
What rules should you follow in developing a feedback system?
Focus the feedback system on the performance, never on the person. (For example, “Notice the angle of the knife as it slices the bread. It's tipped to the right. For correct slicing, it must be perpendicular to the cutting board,” rather than, “You are cutting at too much of an angle. You should hold your knife straighter.”)
Ensure that the feedback system gives confirming feedback to influence the performer to maintain performance.
The feedback system also must provide corrective feedback to influence the performer to change performance in a desired direction.
When providing confirming feedback, avoid corrective feedback and vice-versa. Simultaneous reception of confirming and corrective feedback confuses the performer and decreases performance.
The feedback system must provide specific feedback, but it should not be so detailed that it overloads the performer's ability to process the information.
The system can provide confirming feedback either publicly or privately, but must provide corrective feedback only privately.
The feedback system should provide confirming feedback after successful behaviors and/or accomplishments.
It also should provide corrective feedback after behavior and/or accomplishment. However, this form of feedback is particularly effective if also given just prior to the next performance attempt.
For simple tasks the system should give feedback immediately.
For complex tasks, however, it should allow for some time delay before giving feedback so the performer is in a mental state that helps reception and consideration of the feedback.
It may be most useful to establish logical checkpoints from which performers engaged in a complex task can benefit from feedback. Don't wait until the entire task has been completed to provide feedback.
Feedback systems must adjust the amount and nature of the feedback to match the level of performance difficulty.
As part of developing a feedback system, identify opportunities for feedback to occur naturally from the environment, in addition to or as a replacement for human-generated feedback.
Provide models from which performers can draw correction or confirmation without having to rely on human intervention.
Eliminating Task Interferences
Unlike the two previous forms of performance intervention whereby you develop something, in this case you are taking something away.
What is task interference?
Task interference is anything that presents an obstacle or barrier to performing a required action.
Task interferences come in a wide variety of guises. They can be physical objects or barriers that interfere with the accomplishment of a task (for example, locked doors that must be unlocked repeatedly, poorly designed work spaces that require additional effort to do the job, or phones that ring constantly), administrative delays or requirements (for example, filling out a form time after time, or demanding unnecessary authorizing signatures), low priority (often trivial) must-do tasks (for example, writing long reports after each customer visit, or restocking items before helping the next customer), continuously shifting priorities, co-workers asking for assistance, and many more.
True task interferences genuinely decrease desired performance and are generally a drain on achieving valued accomplishments.
With whom can task interference elimination be used?
It is appropriate for all jobs and all performers.
It is especially important in key jobs. Examples include reducing public relations activities for researchers in a cutting-edge biotechnology firm, assigning administrative tasks to assistants for major decision makers, providing bussing assistance to waitstaff in a busy restaurant, and eliminating nonpriority tasks that interfere with sales visits to potential customers.
What are the components?
Because eliminating interferences is not a system per se, there are no specific components. Generally, however, there are four phases: (1) identifying priority tasks, (2) identifying interferences, (3) eliminating interferences or reassigning lower-priority interfering tasks to others, and (4) monitoring performance change.
How does it work?
When conducting a front-end analysis, identify priority tasks and accomplishments for the performers.
Identify obstacles and interferences to achieving priority accomplishments.
Determine if obstacles and interferences can be eliminated or reassigned.
Eliminate interferences; reassign low-priority tasks to others.
Monitor performance changes.
What rules should you follow in eliminating task interferences?
It is essential to be ruthless in identifying and eliminating interferences. This may require destroying “sacred cows” (like the CEO's weekly staff meetings) or not sharing accomplishments with team members each day. It may also require re-examining policies and procedures to eliminate traditional practices that don't provide benefit.
Make sure that the interferences you plan to eliminate are truly interferences and will not create future problems (for example, doing away with certain paperwork may create serious legal or audit issues).
Apply the “least-cost-competent” rule for reassigning lower-priority tasks. This means giving reassigned tasks to capable but less costly or critical players (for example, reassign the typing of senior-level management memos to less costly administrative personnel who may do the reassigned task as well as or even better than the manager).
Implement task interference elimination carefully and systematically. Explain changes and provide meaningful rationales. Emphasize benefits to performers (for example, additional discretionary time for professional development).
Monitor performance and communicate improvements to all stakeholders.
An Activity for You
Expectations, feedback, task interferences…these are so important to workplace performance that they should always remain close to the surface of your thoughts in performance improvement projects. Look for opportunities to implement these interventions as early as possible. Review your current projects. Examine your frontend analyses. Focus sharply on one or all three of these performance interventions. The payoffs are quick and dramatic.
An Activity for Your WLP Team
We strongly recommend reviewing the three major performance improvement interventions with your team. Have them hunt for opportunities to clarify expectations, develop a feedback system, and eliminate or reassign interfering tasks. Monitor results and share them with the entire team and appropriate stakeholders. Individually or together, these three constitute the interventions that generally require relatively little effort to develop, incur the least cost, and generate the highest ROI.
Chapter Summary
This chapter addressed nonlearning, environmental interventions to attain desired performance. In it
you examined the environment and its effect on human performance in the workplace.
you encountered a variety of environmental dimensions that influence the behaviors and accomplishments of performers in the work setting: physical, social-cultural, work systems and processes, management, and psychological.
you and your WLP team selected projects to examine or re-examine for potential environmental factors that affected performance, and you used a worksheet to help you in your analysis.
you studied what we believe to be the Big Three performance improvement interventions. They are not necessarily the most important, but the lack of clear expectations, the lack of timely and usable feedback, and the presence of task interferences seem to crop up in a great many places. Clearing these up is relatively quick and inexpensive, and often produces spectacular results.
you examined a front-end analysis that indicated one, two, or all three of these environmental interventions were appropriate, and we recommended that you apply the interventions and monitor results.
This was a very important chapter for you as a performance professional. If you are used to creating learning interventions whenever the organization is faced with a performance improvement or change requirement, this chapter content offered new perspectives and tools.
The next chapter continues exploring nonlearning interventions. In it you will encounter the emotional dimensions of workplace performance. Turn the page to enter this intriguing new territory.