The Principles of Business by Dave DeRose

Author:Dave DeRose [DeRose, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781532086946
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2020-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

Training and Discipline

In our ever-changing world, training is a new and necessary evil with which we will have to contend. Why I call it evil is simple. Training is a lot like advertising. A good friend of mine who is a car dealer always says that exactly half of the advertising you do actually works. Tell me which half that is, and I will cease the other half. These are great words to think on and take to heart.

I have watched many companies spend large sums of money on training. For the most part, they send employees to classes on every subject in the book. In the HVAC industry, that can be air flow, combustion, troubleshooting, proper refrigeration practices, and a multitude of items that may or may not work. Here are three common problems that detract from productivity:

1. The employees sent for very technical training are so new that they cannot read a tape measure. If they can, they do not know why they are reading a tape measure. This might sound absurd, but if they have only been with you for a period of less than one year and are new to the industry, they probably lack the ability to understand the technicalities of proper refrigerant charging.

2. The employees are not working in the portion of the company for which this training is relevant. The US Army has a philosophy that to teach an individual something, you have to tell them, tell them again, tell them what you told them, ask them what you told them, and watch to see if they understood it. If they are, say, working on plumbing or even HVAC rough-in, they may not see a set of gauges or a refrigeration bottle for a year or more. You just flushed your training dollars down the proverbial toilet.

3. Training should always improve productivity. In my early years in this industry, while an apprentice plumber/pipe fitter, we had subjects that appeared to be useless or lacked common sense. There was a book on the use and care of tools. While I was in high school Vocational Industrial Clubs of America auto mechanic regional champion and also participated in the Plymouth troubleshooting contest on a state level, I thought I really did not need this. But do you know the proper way to use a pipe wrench? Do you know which cutting oil to use when threading on a power threading machine? If not, then you need training in that area. If you are a plumber, do you know the difference between a vent stack and a stack vent?

The three problems above all point to the same kind of issue: Did you train on combustion and then send a crew out to install a gas piping job, but the crew did not know which oil to use when threading? I used this as I watched three techs threading pipe one day. They all were cussing the brand-new dyes as they wiped the threads off the pipe. One

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