Workplace Literacy: Are Your Employees Making the Grade?
Chances are that you have at least one employee who performs below acceptable levels. Perhaps he or she makes seemingly careless errors, consistently fails to follow instructions, or doesn't comply with your organization's "continuous improvement" requirements.
Whatever the case, you've probably attributed causes to these failings: laziness, lack of commitment, personal problems, or maybe even outright defiance. And, if you have considered the possibility of a skills deficit, in all likelihood you assumed that it is task-related.
It would occur to very few of us that these troubled employees may, in fact, lack some very basic skills - such as reading, writing, and math - that we tend to take for granted. But without those as a foundation, how can they possibly be expected to master the higher-level competencies that their jobs require of them?
For those of you who think that "illiteracy can't happen here," consider these statistics from a 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey:
- Over 20 percent of adults can't read well enough to complete an application.
- Another 25 percent, while able to read at a somewhat higher level, still lack the ability to function successfully on the job and in society.
That's almost half of the population!
There are countless reasons why a person may be functionally illiterate. Some of the more common ones are:
- English is not her native language.
- He may have dropped out of school at an early age.
- She may have completed her education, but is having difficulty transferring the skills learned in an academic setting to the workplace.
- He may have learning disabilities that prevent him from processing information effectively.
It is important to understand that the absence of these fundamental skills does not mean that a person is unintelligent or worthless to an organization. As a matter of fact, many of these very same individuals were well-respected workers who hid their "secret" for years. Recent changes to the business environment, however, have made it increasingly difficult for them to keep pace.
Gone are the days when unskilled labor could easily find - and succeed at - a job. An employee that once worked an assembly line is now expected to program and monitor the machine that has replaced him. The quality initiatives so prevalent in today's manufacturing environments require that workers track data, calculate deviations, and report results. And trends such as team-based models and participative management have pushed decision-making and problem-solving responsibilities down to the rank-and-file.
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