When manufacturers face safety issues or recurring quality problems, they often assume additional employee training is the answer. Enterprise Minnesota’s Sandy Borstad, a talent development expert and business growth consultant, says they should first walk through a process that identifies the root of the problem.
“In many cases, training isn’t what’s missing. What’s missing might be a clear process, a tough conversation, or aligned expectations,” Borstad says.
She calls the impulse “reactionary training” and offers an alternative to manufacturing leaders in her step-by-step process to identify and address underlying causes. She has created a “solution map” that shows companies how to respond to challenges by attacking the core of the problem.
First things first
Borstad says one reason many employers use training as a default solution is the fact that it is such an effective tool to help employees do their jobs well. “We jump to training because it is so powerful. When we jump to a training solution, that’s reactionary training.”
Instead of reflexively pursuing training when presented with a performance issue, Borstad encourages leaders to first ask questions, much as a doctor will do when diagnosing medical issues. “When you go to the doctor with a sore knee, you don’t want them to immediately prescribe physical therapy without first asking if the issue is actually your hip, your posture, or even your shoes,” she says. “Organizations owe themselves the same discipline before they prescribe training.”
She points to a former client who blamed new hires for recurring safety violations and called for additional training. Borstad’s analysis revealed seasoned employees were behind most incidents. The problem didn’t result from lack of employee skill — it stemmed from process design, unclear expectations, and a lack of accountability. Correcting those areas produced improvements where training alone would have failed.
Another large firm proposed producing a training video to correct the same recurring error. The real fix was a simple conversation and direct instructions.
“If you don’t stop to ask the right questions, you’ll keep repeating the same mistakes,” Borstad says.
The first step in the process is to clearly define the scenario. “We want to find out what the current state is, what the future state is, and what the gap is in the middle,” Borstad says, urging leaders to outline measurable benchmarks.
She uses safety as an example, citing a company that expects to have safety incidents for less than 3% per thousand labor hours, but in reality has 6%, and in one job area specifically has 10%. “We know what we want to happen, and we know what’s really happening,” she says.
Being very specific about those measures is important. They can be safety numbers, number of errors or quality specifications, but the measures should include specific data that describes where the company is and where it wants to go. After defining the problem and determining what to measure, Borstad says companies should discuss how they will track the data, at what frequency, and how it will be shared with employees so they know they’re making progress.
Five buckets
With the problem defined and measures set, leaders can uncover why the issue is occurring by using observation, data, and employee feedback. The cornerstone of Borstad’s approach involves five diagnostic “buckets” to uncover what’s truly driving the issue: culture, expectations, knowledge, skills, and processes.
To assess culture, Borstad says companies need to know if leadership behaviors, company values, and daily practices support the desired outcome. Simple questions can reveal weaknesses in culture. “Do employees enjoy being at work? Are they enjoying what they’re doing? Are they empowered? Do they feel a part of something larger than themselves?” Borstad asks.
She describes a safety issue that stemmed from a cultural issue. “There was a high demand for productivity. People knew how to do it safely, but they weren’t doing it that way because all the emphasis from company leadership was on productivity.”
If the cause of a problem falls in the culture bucket, it’s important to determine exactly what that issue is. Borstad offers several questions for reflection: “Do people feel like they’re being micromanaged? Are people not role modeling? It’s one thing to say something, but then another to act a different way. Maybe management or leadership isn’t walking the talk? Is it a safety culture? Is it a quality culture?”
The second step is to develop a long-term solution. Fixing cultural problems requires a plan of action and time to transform. “You have to have a plan,” she says. “You can’t just start acting like things are different.”
Nonetheless, companies often can’t wait for that long-term solution to kick in. “When culture is the root of your performance problem, you want to ask, ‘What can I do right now?’ to begin addressing this issue.”
In the safety scenario, Borstad says the company could shift the emphasis from productivity to safety. That’s exactly what one company did. “Their morning meetings emphasized working safely with quality in mind — profitability and productivity would follow.” In the meantime, leaders could address larger cultural issues.
Another company that made ATV parts was experiencing recurring quality issues. They determined the root of the problem was culture related: Employees didn’t have a sense of the importance of their work. Leaders had their customer, the ATV manufacturer, bring ATVs to the company for employees to ride and enjoy so they could see the end result of their work. Quality improved significantly when employees understood their work was important.
To determine if knowledge is the source of the problem, leaders must determine if employees know what to do, and if they have the information they need. “This one sounds really simple, but we miss this more often than we think we do,” Borstad says.
Issues in the knowledge bucket should be separated by “knowledge” and “skill.” Knowledge is simply information — how finished products are marked after a final step, for example. If employees struggle to remember certain steps, a job aid such as a list or chart can provide that knowledge.
“We often spend too much time telling people what to do and not enough time making it easy for them to do it,” Borstad says, who endorses job aids as a tool for ensuring employees have access to the knowledge they need.
For expectations, managers need to ensure they have made goals and roles clear. Problems often arise because employees are working from assumptions rather than defined expectations.
The questions Borstad encourages leaders to consider in this area include: Do they know what the goal is? Do they know what doing a good job is? She gives examples such as, what is acceptable for tardiness? What is acceptable for absenteeism?
“Leaders’ roles should also be clear,” Borstad says. For example, a lead might not think it is his responsibility to make sure people are working safely. The supervisor might disagree — expectations are misaligned.
“You want to make sure expectations are clear. And you’ll want check-ins to ensure expectations are continually met,” Borstad says.Similarly, a gap can result if employee skills are lacking. Do they have the technical ability and confidence to perform consistently? “This is where we traditionally think of the word training. At Enterprise Minnesota, we refer to this as skill development because in order to do a job well, there is a skill — technical or interpersonal — that needs to be developed,” she says.
When it comes to skill development, Borstad believes that how a skill is taught is critical — at least as important as the content. It’s important to have a system to ensure employees are learning best practices safely and consistently.
Within this bucket, leaders should identify exactly which skills and which employees need to be developed. She laments the scattershot approach if just one or two employees really need skill development. “If one leader won’t address conflict, companies often decide to train all leaders in conflict resolution because they don’t want to address a person individually. Skill development should be specific to the skill and specific to the person,” she says.
Finally, Borstad says, the real issue could be process. Is the process confusing or inefficient? Does it lead to mistakes? A confusing process is often the cause of reactionary training, Borstad says. “One of the things that I’ve heard over and over in my career is when something doesn’t make sense, when something leads to a lot of mistakes and something is hard to do, we’ll just train them on it.”
She offers the example of a system used for order entry that requires inputting a long and complex part number. The numbers are similar to each other and change a lot. The list of numbers is in another program, so employees have to exit one computer system, log into another, find the sheet, find the code, and go back to the first to input it. The result was a lot of errors, ordering backlogs, inventory mistakes, and unhappy customers. The company’s first instinct: more training.
Instead, company leaders investigated root causes and discovered a flawed process. They spent $5,000 on a software update that incorporated automatic lookup for the part numbers and a cross-referencing system that double-checked employee work. “By spending $5,000, they saved thousands and thousands of dollars in inefficiency. Fixing the process strengthened their client reputation,” Borstad says.
She emphasizes that going through the flowchart isn’t about slowing companies down. It’s about ensuring their investments — whether in training, process improvement, or leadership development — actually solve the problem.
When considering which bucket might be causing performance issues, Borstad urges companies to look for overlaps. “In many cases, the problem touches more than one of these buckets. If you don’t stop and ask which ones apply, you’ll waste time and money on the wrong fix,” she says.
Engaging employees
A critical element of Borstad’s process is employee engagement. She encourages leaders to observe work directly, ask employees where mistakes occur, and include upstream and downstream perspectives. Involving employees not only yields better information but also builds trust and engagement.
If employees are enlisted in identifying sources of problems and suggesting potential solutions, the workplace dynamic shifts. “When we get to the real issue, they’re energized.”
The opposite is also true. “You miss the best feedback when you don’t talk to the people doing the work,” Borstad says.
She adds that requiring additional, unnecessary training can be an engagement killer. “When we don’t use the framework, employees might end up sitting through training that doesn’t help, we don’t address the real problem, and disengagement rises,” Borstad says.
Solving problems, promoting growth
For manufacturers, the urgency to evaluate the real source of performance issues is significant. Persistent labor shortages mean companies can’t afford to misallocate scarce human capital. Experienced, skilled employees are retiring, and younger workers often arrive with less technical preparation.
“Companies can’t afford to waste time or dollars on Band-Aid solutions,” Borstad says. “The best return on investment comes when you address the real issue — not when you put a patch over the surface problem.”
Borstad’s solution map doesn’t apply solely to when things go wrong. It can be used proactively, as a checklist for new processes. “You can go through the five areas and ask yourself: Do we have the right culture for this expansion? Are our expectations aligned? Do our people have the necessary skills? Are the processes in place?” she says. “It’s a way to make sure you’re set up for success before you invest in growth.”
Whether manufacturers are using the process to address problems or lay the groundwork for growth, the solution map offers the potential for tangible, immediate returns. “Employers will find that they have much more engaged and knowledgeable employees, aligned expectations, skill development that works, a stronger culture, and improved processes,” Borstad says.
Organizations that internalize the framework also develop the capacity to diagnose issues, engage employees, and craft targeted solutions on their own. “That’s the goal,” Borstad says. “We don’t want companies to come to us every time they hit a roadblock. We want to empower them with a tool they can use to solve problems and build their future.”
Adopting this mindset takes effort, Borstad acknowledges. Leaders accustomed to rapid responses may resist the upfront analysis. “It does take more time initially,” she says. “But rushing into training that doesn’t solve the problem takes far longer in the end.”
She likes the metaphor: A sharp saw is important, but you should first ask whether you need to cut down the tree. “That’s exactly what this process is about,” she says. “Don’t just sharpen the saw. Make sure you’re solving the right problem.”
Return to the Winter 2025 issue of Enterprise Minnesota® magazine.
