Job Aids

What job aids are

Job aids (المعينات الوظيفية) are short materials placed where the work is done, so that an employee can refer to them while doing it. A job aid can be a checklist, a set of numbered steps, a table that leads to a decision, a reference card or a prompt inside the screen on which the work is entered.

Job aids have a single purpose: to move the load from memory to the page. The employee is not asked to memorise the order of eight steps, only to know where to find them while standing in front of the case.

In the sources we reviewed, we found no measurement on which to base a figure for the effect of job aids on error rates, so no such figure is given here. What follows describes how job aids work and when they are worth making, not how much they reduce mistakes.

When job aids can replace training, and when they cannot

Whether job aids can replace training decides where they fit at all, and the answer rests on three descriptions of the task:

• A repeated task with fixed steps. A job aid on its own can be enough for it.
• A rare task that can still be described. Here a job aid can serve better than training, because what is trained for and used once a year can be forgotten before the occasion arrives.
• A task that calls for judgement in an unclear case. Here a job aid does not stand in for competence. What it can do is remind the employee of the questions to ask before deciding.

Whoever hands over a job aid for a task of the third kind, believing that a training programme has been saved, has passed the employee a decision they were not prepared for and given them a sheet of paper that can later be held against them.

The ADDIE model places job aids among the things its development stage produces to stay with the trainee after the programme ends. Where a procedure changes at short notice, a written notice and a job aid at the point of work can suit the change better than a programme built through five stages.

The forms job aids take, each suited to a kind of task

The choice of form is not a matter of taste. It follows the structure of the task. One error to avoid is writing everything as a list of steps, which then has exceptions squeezed into it until it grows so long that nobody uses it.

• Numbered steps. They suit a task with a single path and no branches, such as a procedure carried out in the same order every time.
• A checklist. It suits a task whose items are independent, where the order does not matter but missing an item does. The difference from numbered steps is that the second step assumes the first, whereas a checklist item assumes nothing before it.
• A decision table or decision tree. It suits a task that branches according to the facts of the case. This form absorbs the exceptions without lengthening the main path, because each reader passes only along their own branch.
• A reference card. It suits material that has to be recalled rather than carried out in sequence: codes, limits, or names and whom to contact in each case.
• A prompt at the point of entry. It suits one particular error that recurs in one particular field. It covers the narrowest ground of any form, but it appears at the moment the error is made rather than before it.

A calculation showing when a job aid is worth making

A job aid is not free. It has to be written, reviewed with the people who do the work, and updated whenever the procedure changes. The figures below are assumed. Their purpose is to show the method, not to set a threshold.

Take a task carried out 40 times a month, in which the person doing it is estimated to lose 4 minutes each time looking for the right step or asking about it:

• Time lost each month: 40 times 4 equals 160 minutes.
• Time lost each year: 160 times 12 equals 1,920 minutes, or 32 hours.
• Cost of making the job aid: 3 hours of writing and of review with the people who carry out the task, then half an hour of review each quarter, or 2 hours a year. The total for the first year is 5 hours.

The difference in the first year is 27 hours, and in the following year 30 hours, because the cost of writing is not repeated. On time alone, this is a task whose job aid is worth making.

Now reverse the example: a task carried out twice a year, losing 10 minutes each time, which comes to 20 minutes a year against 3 hours of writing. Here the time saved justifies nothing. Time is not the only measure, however. If an error in this rare task carries a large cost or a long correction, the job aid is made for the sake of the error, not the minutes. That is why the two figures are examined together: how frequent the task is, and what an error in it costs. A rare task with a costly error is a case in which someone who counts only time can reach the wrong answer.

The quarterly review in the calculation is an assumption made to show the cost, not a sourced recommendation. The right interval for reviewing a job aid follows how quickly the procedure itself changes.

What makes job aids get used

• Being where the work happens. A job aid belongs on the screen where the procedure is carried out, or at the machine itself. A job aid kept in a shared folder that has to be searched for will not be searched for.
• Being quick to follow. A job aid should be possible to take in within seconds. Once it runs past a page, it is no longer a job aid but reading material that gets put off. That a job aid can be taken in within seconds describes its purpose; in the sources we reviewed, we found no maximum length or recommended number of items.
• Being written as instructions. “Check the order number”, not “attention should be paid to verifying”.
• Carrying the date of its last update and the name of its owner. A job aid with no known owner does not get corrected.
• Being built with the people who do the work. The steps that drop out of a description written at a desk are the very steps on which people stumble.

How job aids differ from an employee handbook and from knowledge management

The three can be kept in one place, but they answer different questions:

• An employee handbook answers “what are the rules of work here?”. It brings together the organisation’s policies and procedures, what it expects and what the employee is entitled to, in a single reference. It is gone through once and then consulted when needed.
• Knowledge management answers “where is what the organisation knows?”. It is the capture, organisation and availability of knowledge to whoever needs it.
• A job aid answers “what do I do now, at this step?”. It is consulted only during the act itself.

So a job aid is judged by one thing: whether it was opened at the moment the task was carried out. A well written job aid that nobody opens has failed in its placement, not in its wording.

What else is called a job aid but is not one

The confusion here differs from the one above. It lies not in the purpose of the document but in its standing or in who owns it:

• An approved policy. It decides what is permitted and what is not, while a job aid explains how what has been decided is carried out. A text should not be condensed into a summary pinned to a wall and then treated as if it were the text, because the summary drops the exception, and the exception is where a dispute can arise. Where a job aid and the policy differ, the policy is the authority, and the job aid is corrected, not the other way round.
• Training material. It builds understanding before the work and is gone through once, whether it is delivered in a room or as the asynchronous part of a blended learning programme. A job aid is called up during the work and builds nothing. Whoever condenses a training presentation into two pages and calls it a job aid produces material that neither teaches nor helps.
• A record of execution. It is a sheet filled in to prove that the work was done: a record, not a job aid, even when it looks like a checklist. A job aid is consulted in order to act; a record is signed in order to be kept. Merging the two on one sheet is what spoils the checklist, as described further down.

Where the need for job aids appears

• Repeated questions put to human resources. A question asked again every week can be answered once in a job aid, rather than in a message written each time.
• Employee self service. It lets employees carry out for themselves what used to pass through human resources, and self service without a job aid in place can produce incorrect requests that are sent back.
• A new employee’s first weeks. During employee onboarding, what a new hire is asked to remember can exceed what they can retain.
• Anything recently changed. An amended step needs a reminder at the point where it is carried out until it replaces the old habit.

Cases that change how job aids are designed

Everything above assumes an employee who works at a screen in an office, reads Arabic and holds the same document as colleagues. When any of these conditions falls away, something changes with it:

• Field work or work on a production line. There is no screen to attach a job aid to, so it takes the form of a card at the machine or a board at the place of work. The constraint is that updating is manual: a printed copy on the wall does not change when the source file changes, so someone has to go round and actually replace the copies. Otherwise the update has happened for the person who wrote it and not for the people who work from it.
• A team working in more than one language. A job aid that can be taken in within seconds in one language cannot be taken in as quickly in a second one, and translation multiplies the number of copies that need updating. The practical answer is less text and more diagrams and numbering, because what is not written does not need translating.
• A task with consequences for an outside party. Here the job aid explains the steps and does not decide the rule, and the authority on the rule is its official source. Writing into a job aid something that stands in for the text gives an administrative sheet a weight it does not carry, and people then go on working from it after its source has changed.
• A workplace where personal devices are not allowed. An electronic job aid opened on a phone does not reach the employee, so it is placed in the system on which the work is done, or it does not exist.

What undermines job aids

• Being out of date. A job aid that describes an abandoned procedure leads the employee into error with more confidence than they would have had in themselves.
• Length. A job aid that grows too long turns into a document that people are referred to and do not consult.
• Several versions. A sheet at the desk, a file on the computer and an old message, with no way of telling which one is correct.
• Use as an accountability record. An employee who knows that a checklist will be used as evidence against them can sign it without going through its items.
• Use as a substitute for fixing the procedure. A procedure that needs a job aid of three pages is a complicated procedure, and the job aid then hides the problem rather than solving it. The remedy lies in training needs analysis, which asks, before any training, whether training is what closes the gap in the first place.

Job aids and the establishment’s approved documents

In the sources we reviewed, we found no provision that addresses job aids by name. So a job aid is described here neither as required nor as a substitute for an approved document. Questions about an establishment’s work regulation and its other approved documents have their own sources, and the definition of job aids does not settle them. An organizational manual is a comparable case: it is an internal document, and it is not the work regulation.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.

Related terms

• ADDIE Model
• Blended Learning
• Employee Onboarding
• Massed Practice
• Formalization