| Description: Do you work as an employee, supervisor, or director of an agency that provides services to clients with learning difficulties? Are you satisfied with the progress that your clients are making towards achieving their goals? Behavior analysis has developed a powerful technology for helping people, but too many clients don't receive the benefits. Why not? The easy answer is that employees don't do what they are told. But the employees' performance, just like their clients' performance, is a product of their environment. Do employees have the resources, training, and management necessary to help their clients achieve their goals? What about their supervisors? What about their directors? Organizations are groups of individuals who must work together to provide their clients with the outcomes they want. The failure of clients to make adequate progress is not usually an individual employee performance problem, but a performance problem at the system, process, and individual levels of the organization. This workshop will provide you with a set of tools to pinpoint organizational performance problems; analyze their causes; recommend the best solutions; solve the problems by designing and implementing solutions that might include more efficient resources, training, and management practices; and evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, and return on investment of your solutions. |
| Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of this workshop, participants should be able to:
Pinpoint a client’s performance problems—after collecting information about the client’s desired results and the performance necessary to achieve those results—by a) defining the client’s desired results and performance and b) evaluating current results and performance to decide whether the problem is worth solving.
Analyze a client’s performance problems, given information about the causes of those problems, classifying them as “can-do,” “know-how,” and/or “want-to” problems and identifying their causes as defective resources, training programs, and management practices
List possible solutions, given an evaluation of current performance problems and an analysis of their causes, considering the estimated value, cost, and compliance of each solution with ethical standards, and recommend those solutions with the best return on investment
Solve a performance problem by designing and implementing the solutions—given a list of recommended solutions to the performance problem, which may include resources, training, and performance management—such as more efficient resources, training, or performance management practices
Evaluate solution effectiveness, efficiency, and return on investment, and recommend design changes needed to produce further improvements, after collecting measures of improvement in performance and results, as well as of the time and costs to produce that improvement |
| Activities: This workshop will involve the following activities:
Fluency practice—participants will gain fluency in component skills of organizational performance engineering by practicing with flashcards and measuring and graphing their own learning efficiencies.
Practice solving organizational performance problems—participants will practice solving organizational performance problems with case studies provided by the instructor.
Discussion of performance engineering projects—participants will discuss their performance-engineering projects, present their work to the instructor and fellow students, and help their fellow students solve project-related problems. |
| Audience: This workshop will be of interest to anyone responsible for solving human performance problems, whether these exist at the organizational, process, or individual levels. It can help agency directors change the flow of resources and feedback to and within their organizations so that their agencies can achieve their missions of helping clients achieve their goals. It can help agency managers redesign work processes so that staff are able to work together more efficiently to help clients achieve their goals. And it can help agency supervisors and trainers provide more efficient resources, training, and management practices so that individual staff will be more effective in helping clients achieve their goals. |