Lesson 4

Job Site Training - slide 2

Natural Cues

A natural cue represents some feature of the work environment, job tasks or activities, which signals a customer what to do next.

The first things that I like to look for within any work environment are the natural cues that exist in that environment that can assist the worker to learn his or her work tasks. We all have natural cues in our work environment. For instance, I am sitting here in my office right now looking at my window. I can tell you that the sun moves in and out of my window during different times of the day. In fact, towards the end of the day, I actually can use the cue of it getting dark to signal the end of my workday.

Do I really consciously attend to this cue everyday? Probably not, but it's something that has become ingrained within the ebb and flow of the day that gives me some cues as to when I might take a break, when it's lunchtime, when I need to go home at the end of the day. You probably have many of these cues within your work environment as well. An informal definition of a natural cue is that a natural cue represents some feature of the work environment, job tasks or activities, which signals the customer what to do next.

Ernie Panscofar, who does a lot of instructing in this area, has a cute little saying that he uses that I like to paraphrase. But I want to give him credit for it since it is his. He is says, “the cue is the clue to do something new.”
Anyway, a natural cue is something that you and I can see, hear, touch, feel or smell. It is some relevant feature of the task that gives us a clue that we need to do something. You and I use those all of the time. Think about our watch. It might be an off/on indicator light. It may be a buzzer at the service door, our telephone ringing on our desk, our computer printer humming as pages are printed off for us to look at. It could be an announcement over the loud speaker. For that matter, it could be the body language of a co-worker that tells us whether we have done something correct or incorrect. I think that employment specialists get really adept at identifying natural cues in the workplace. I would like to give you an example of this as a story.

I don't know whether any of you have eaten in restaurants like Bonanza or Steakhouse where you go in and you place your order, you pick up your food and go sit down. Have you ever been sitting there and the server comes over and just pours whatever you have to drink without even asking you what it is you are drinking? How do they know what to pour into your glass? One day I was eating lunch with a friend in one of these particular establishments, and she wasn't in this field so I know she must have thought I was a little touched in the head. But we approached the service line, and I asked for a Diet Coke because that is what I usually drink. All of a sudden I looked up at the counter at all of the different glasses on the shelf and had one of those "A ha's"! Because it suddenly occurred to me why the server at one of those places can tell what you are drinking without asking you.

That's because the different types of glasses represent a natural cue in that environment as to what you are drinking. Regular coffee was served in a white cute. Decaffeinated coffee was served in a white cup with a gold band around it. Diet beverages were in the amber colored glasses. An individual who might go to work in that particular environment may first need to learn the cues about that particular task so he or she could be successful in accomplishing it.
The first thing that you really need to do with identifying natural cues within the workplace is to observe what is going on. Look around and see if you can tease out some of the cues that exist with the job duties that the individual is going to be performing. Of course, always ask the employer and coworkers to assist you in identifying cues in the workplace because you or I are not going to be experts in any particular job that we assist the individual in learning, the employer or coworkers are the experts. They know the tasks and they in turn can assist you in figuring the tricks of the trade, those unwritten assistance cues that could help the person be successful. Let's look at an example of that.

An employment specialist, who was assisting her customer in learning how to restock the restroom in a hotel, told this story to me. The individual was actually cleaning rooms within this hotel so the individual was actually cleaning within this hotel. It was an upscale, five-star hotel that all those nice little treasures that you find in the restroom like the shower cap, mouthwash, extra soaps and hand lotion. This particular individual was having difficulty, because he was unable to read, distinguishing the shoeshine packet from the shower cap packages. If he were to open up the packages to look inside to see which was the remaining one on the counter, the package would be crushed and messed up resulting in his having to discard the packet.

So the employment specialist is scratching her head and couldn’t think of any way other than opening up the packet. I knew that there was nothing on the counter that I could teach the individual to pick up the packet for the shoeshine cloth and the shower cap package by the way they had stocked the cart. She talked with one of the other women there that had the same job responsibility and she said, "By the way, my person that I am working with has a very hard time determining which packet is missing on the counter. Could you give me any ideas or recommendations as to how you distinguish between those two"?

The woman apparently said, " Yes, that was a problem for me initially, because I would have to take the time to pick up the packet, read what was on there to determine which one was left, but I quickly learned that if I would just squeeze the packet a little bit I would find that the shoeshine packet was soft while the shower cap packet made a crinkly noise. That would give me information which item I would need to get to restock the counter from my cart."

This person was using an auditory natural cue rather than the more complicated task of reading. This is a good example also of assisting the individual or eliminating parts of a task. In other words, the customer that cannot read doesn't always have to be able to read. We don't have to ever worry about teaching the person that particular skill because we can use a natural cue to assist the individual in being successful.