Gloria Gery provided us foundational insights to the discipline of performance support in her 1991 book Electronic Performance Support Systems: How and why to remake the workplace through the strategic application of technology. In this seminal work, Gery makes the case for investing in a specific deliverable called an EPSS (Electronic Performance Support System).
In Chapter 4, What is Electronic Performance Support, she states that the goal of an EPSS is “to provide whatever is necessary to generate performance and learning at the moment of need.” In the same paragraph she charges that an EPSS must be “universally and consistently available on demand anytime, anyplace, and regardless of situation, without unnecessary intermediaries involved in the process.”
In this same chapter, Gery makes a distinction between her vision of an EPSS and traditional help systems, job aids, and computer-based training. Her version of an EPSS is “a hybrid concept: it selects the best of previously independent species—and through its combinatorial approach, produces a new breed that has familiar attributes but is inherently different at the same time.”
Outside of her book, Gery provides a more detailed description of an EPSS as an “orchestrated set of technology enabled services that provide on-demand access to:
- integrated information,
- guidance,
- advice,
- assistance,
- training, and
- tools
to enable high-level job performance with a minimum of support from other people”.
We have made great progress since 1991 in the technology and methodology for developing of this kind of a performance support solution. If you want some clarity as to why your organization should pursue EPSS capability, read Gery’s book. It makes a clear case that:
- Organizations aren’t effectively managing the tactical, day-to-day performance of their people because they lack the ability to see it and actually manage it.
- We have evolved to event-based training solutions that are too disconnected from the actual workflow (what Gery calls the “performance zone”).
- Properly designed EPSSs are the solution.
In Chapter 1, The Great Cover Up, Gery makes the case that “Our business organizations are extremely effective at hiding the performance crisis—from themselves as well as everybody else.” This has certainly been my experience. Several years ago, I conducted a Rapid Workflow Analysis (RWA) for an organization to map the work of their sales team. The Executive Vice President for sales attended the session and was shocked to find out that his team was performing tasks that others could and should be doing. Even though they had a “sales process” in place, it was general and high level. Until then, they had failed to identify and integrate the 69 sales tasks we identified during the RWA session into their overarching sales process. This company, like most, were blind to what its people actually did in the flow of work (Gery’s “performance zone”).
For me, Chapter 2 provides the most insightful contribution of the entire book. Its message is more relevant today than when Gery wrote it. Every learning professional should study it in depth. It’s titled Getting to the Performance Zone. At the beginning of the chapter, Gery briefly describes the history of how “training (and learning) [has] moved out of the actual job context,” meaning out of the workflow where employees were historically coached and mentored while they performed their work.
It’s here where Gery makes a distinction between training and “job-learning”. This is a distinction worth pondering. What’s the difference between the training/learning solutions your organization is producing right now and “job-learning?”
She describes a “true job expert” as one who has “integrated the numerous knowledge and skill strands that produce results.” If your learning solutions are producing this level of proficiency, there’s a good chance you are developing “job-learning” solutions.
This is very different from what Gery describes as a training event approach that focuses on “content related to a job” and “information transfer, developing largely cognitive knowledge that (hopefully) prepare(s) people to learn to actually do things quickly while on the job.”
In this chapter, Gery also describes how “post-training support [has been] reduced to manuals, an occasional job aid, and intermittent supervisory commentary,” and how “asking the nearest person has become the norm,” but “…unfortunately, the nearest person doesn’t always know or have the time or interest to advise and coach.” We’ve certainly grown beyond this today, haven’t we? These days those manuals have become a myriad of websites overlaying content and media repositories. We have vast amounts of post-training information scattered everywhere that still fails to adequately address “post-training support” to enable effective performance on the job.
Gery addresses a broad range of challenges that inhibit effective performance in an organization’s workflow (aka performance zone). She writes, “What’s required is the conscious and systematic design of electronic performance support systems (EPSSs) that provide on-demand access to all of the resources individuals need to solve a problem, perform a task, or—someday—to do an entire job. In other words, individual employees and entire organizations can systematically work and achieve in the performance zone.”
What Gery is describing is a “workflow EPSS” strategy to design EPSSs that enable effective on-the-job performance. The goal is to build a “technology enabled set of services” that provides 2-click access to all the tasks people need to perform to efficiently accomplish the work of the organization.