Job Instruction Breakdowns and Work Standards

I first learned about job instructions, part of the approach of Training Within Industry, more than five years ago.   

The Job Instruction outline, known as the ‘job breakdown sheet’,  requires you to describe the what, how and why of key steps in a particular job.    I got very excited when I first encountered this outline. I thought it provided a missing piece to my improvement projects that struggled to build in aspects of quality control.   If a team described changes to work to achieve an aim, like ‘apply sealants to kids’ molars any time a child comes to the dental clinic’, then a job breakdown sheet  looked like a way to translate the aim into specific work tasks.

I understood that consistently good performance patient after patient required a job definition.  Would a job breakdown sheet serve our need?

While the job breakdown sheet has compelling ingredients for learning a job, it is not intended to be the definition of a good job; rather it is intended as a script an instructor will use to teach someone how to do a task correctly, efficiently, and safely.  

The definition of a good job is known to industrial engineers as a work standard.  The term work standard may conjure images of rigid application of a fixed ‘best way’ of work dictated by experts, a legacy of Frederick Taylor’s approach.  A modern understanding of work standard is an operational definition of work to produce a product or service that is a provisional hypothesis:  if we carry out work according to the definition, we will get the service or product intended.   The work standard represents a definition at a particular time developed by the people responsible for carrying out and doing the work.    

Isao Kato describes work standards as comprising three parts:  (1) a definition of normal performance of the product or service as experienced by the customer; (2) a definition of normal operating conditions for equipment and process steps to produce the normal product or service; (3) a definition of normal actions by people doing the work to assure normal operating conditions.

A work standard can have pictures, extensive descriptions and references to other documents.  Almost necessarily, a work standard will be longer and more involved than a job breakdown sheet.  

I stumbled over the distinction between work standards and a job breakdown sheet but didn’t initially understand the difference.   I stumbled despite reading that the job breakdown sheet is not a replacement for detailed policy, procedure manual or technical bulletin.

When working with colleagues to develop a job breakdown sheet for sealants, we had many conversations about specific details.  Initial drafts had more than ten steps; we wanted to include pictures and references to technical bulletins to give a complete definition.  I realize now we were confused.   We needed to have a definition of the job—a work standard— and were trying to make the job breakdown sheet answer that need.

The distinction between a work standard and a job breakdown sheet shows up in Kato’s five Step Ups to standardized work.  Kato distinguishes Step Up 1, creating work standards that define ‘normal’, from Step Up 2, making ‘abnormal’ easy to see.   Step Up 2 includes education and training and is a natural home for job instruction breakdowns.    

In my current oral health improvement project, we are starting with a definition of a good job in caring for patients with diabetes.   Job instruction breakdowns can help once we have defined the good job in a work standard.

More on Job Instruction

Donald Dinero has a comprehensive discussion of Job Instruction in his 2005 book Training Within Industry:  The Foundation of Lean, Productivity Press, New York.   In particular, Dinero’s discussion of Job Breakdown Sheets Versus Work Instructions in Chapter 9 helped me understand the specific role of job breakdown sheets in Job Instruction.