Lesson 4

Job Site Training - slide 11

Self-monitoring example
Issue: Customer has difficulty remembering job duty sequence
Details: Customer is responsible for vacuuming the third floor of a department store. He is randomly missing cleaning different sections of the floor.

Let’s revisit for a minute the person who was vacuuming in the department store who had initially learned the task by watching the employment specialist move around the room. Eventually that problem was solved and the job coach faded from the site. Down the road the employer called the job coach and said that the individual was having some difficulty in remembering to vacuum the different departments on the 3rd floor where he was responsible for maintaining the area. This was a department store and his area had a shoe department, a cosmetics department, and a clothes department, etc. We could approach brainstorming this issue of challenge in a number of different ways. In this instance, a co-worker agreed to check the work at specified time intervals and to remind the individual if he had skipped areas in the store. This, in and of itself, is a good strategy and a good natural support, and could be worked into the solution to meet the challenge.

However, we can’t always depend on the co-worker to be around to provide the feedback. So this will be one piece of the puzzle that will be put together in order to assist the individual in remembering the task. Another strategy was to get the co-workers to provide some reinforcement or comment when the individual was successful. In other words, “Hey Joe! Today I noticed that you did a great job in ladies shoes!” or “Man, you really did that fast!” The provided that feedback that is so important to all of us. Can we tap in to the co-workers providing that?

I would like to take this one step further, because although they were excellent co-workers who could provide the natural support, let’s also make Joe responsible for monitoring his own performance. This brings us back to that self-management strategies and what Joe can do for himself to be successful on the job.

In this particular scenario some little booklets were developed, no bigger than the size of an index card, in which each page represented a picture of a section of the store. For instance, there was a picture of shoes, then a picture of a ladies dress, and then cosmetics. As Joe enter the work site in the morning he would pick up one of these picture books from his supervisor who had volunteered to assist Joe in keeping up with his booklets. Joe would look at the first picture in his booklet and go vacuum that area of the store. When he completed that section, he would tear off that picture and throw it a way as a self-assessment strategy and it also ended up being a self-reinforcing strategy because he got a great deal of intrinsic reward out of knowing he had finished and done a good job when he threw that picture away. On-top of that we went back to the co-workers providing positive feedback when the work was completed.

Would this same strategy work in every situation where a person is having difficulty? Probably not, each person is an individual. What I would challenge you to do is to take some of the ideas that we have discussed in this section of the lecture and come-up with some of your own support packages to assist the person in meeting the job site training challenge.