Do you remember the movie An Officer and a Gentleman, when Louis Gossett Jr. effortlessly kept time with all of those sweating, puffing officer candidates as they ran and tried to sing "I don't know but I've been told...?" Do you recall how Gossett, playing the indomitable Sergeant Foley, beat both skill and character into those would-be pilots? Well, it may work when four years later the trainees can earn six-figure salaries working for the airlines, but it won't work in your art department!
I've meant to cover training issues for quite a while, not only because my editors have been asking for it, but because I've always had a great deal of pride in the many people I have trained in screen printing and creating artwork on the computer. It has frustrated me that I haven't forced myself to organize some important things in this area. However, I've finally come up with a few general guidelines to consider as you develop training procedures for your artists.
Before I start, I should mention a couple of things that I consider prerequisites to training. The first concern is the concept of "input time vs. output time" in measuring worker productivity, and the second is the concept of "cost of quality."
"Traditional supervision" concerns itself largely with inputs and outputs as separate phenomena. An overwhelming concentration on what time an employee gets to work and how often he or she takes breaks is a clear sign that too much importance is being placed on inputs. An employee who stares out of the window for a half hour, then does the assigned task in another half hour, is more productive than an employee who sits right down and gets the job done in two hours. The output is the same. Further, our daydreamer than has an extra hour to keep up with his reading, whether it be the rest of this magazine or the latest issue of MacUser, PC Week, or the local newspaper.
My concern as a supervisor should always be the output (film for the screenmaking department), no matter how much easier it may be to monitor input (exactly how many minutes the employee works and what he does each minute). I want my people to be lazy (so that they will always know how to get the most done in the least amount of time) and well informed (which makes it easier for them to be brilliantly productive when I need a lot of output "right now").
"Cost of quality" is a concept that I first was exposed to about 15 years ago in Philip B. Crosby's book, Quality is Free. (The book so impressed me that I bought 50 copies and gave them to my staff, my suppliers, and several customers. I must have given my last copy away because I don't see it on my shelf where it belongs.) Crosby's cost-of-quality concept simply measures the cost of those things that do not lead to deliverable product, including wasted steps, time and materials needed to make defective parts, and the cost of sorting the good from the bad. He encourages businesses to drive that cost down. And as Steve Duccilli's article "TQM in Action: Richard Riso's Quest for Continual Improvement" (Screen Printing, Mar. 1995, page 60) dramatically recounts, higher quality does not cost more in screen printing.
I tend to prefer Crosby's cultural approach rather than a statistical approach (probably because I am mathematically challenged), but the results are largely the same--higher quality equals lower costs. My bias toward non-statistical analyses may also stem from the wide and changing range of products my shops tended to produce; it is very difficult to gather statistical information on printing ice-cream bars when you only handle that substrate once in your career.
On a related issue, I don't care much for the ISO-9000 standard because I see it as "credentialism" rather than actual progress. A poor process that results in an inferior product can meet ISO-9000 standards if it is precisely documented. More importantly, the standard creates no drive towards improvement.
Considering my most successful training efforts in light of the previous concepts leads me to the following conclusions: I want my people to understand the overall process that they are involved in rather than only their part of the process. I want them to constantly attempt to do work that better satisfies their customers. And I want them to work smart rather than hard and spend less time to get it all done. (My employees have often said that you shouldn't ask me what time it is for fear of receiving a tedious lecture on the physics of time and the history of timekeeping!)
Communication in the art department is essential for expanding employee skills, and gossip is no exception. Gossip as a training tool can be tricky to manage, but rewards are much greater than the risks. Are your people talking a lot as they work? If so, it is almost certainly a good thing. Even if communication starts with discussions about the baseball season (and the prospects of there ever being one again), this will usually lead to artists exchanging information about what will and won't work to get the job out onto the production floor.
Besides talking among themselves, artists need to talk to their fellow employees both upstream and down. In the case of computer artists, this means being comfortable talking to camera- room employees, screenmaking employees, and press operators and diecutters, as well as salesmen and customers. This communication allows them to better know what requirements they need to satisfy. Why would they need to know that? Well, what is quality? According to Crosby, quality is conformance to specifications. It is not shininess, some vague "goodness," or any one measure of precision. Quality is whatever is needed to create the product that the customer expects.
An artist can easily get wrapped up in trying to create a halftone screen with a high line count when a 30-line/in. screen and color fidelity on the final print will satisfy the customer. Conversely, if the pressroom struggles to maintain 0.02-in. registration on some jobs, creating traps twice that large on the artwork when it doesn't interfere with the final image allows the pressroom to create higher-quality products. Remember, the cost of quality in the pressroom is the time, stock, and ink required to print the sheets that aren't good enough to deliver.
A tight and consistent feedback loop for the artists is essential to their training. I've seen countless examples of camera-room and screenmaking folks adjusting the artwork they get to make it more printable, without ever discussing these adjustments with the artist. That adjustment time falls squarely in the cost-of-quality category and can be completely eliminated in the art department if the artists are made aware of the problem. The screenmakers may be very proud of their ability to make up for some ongoing incompetence in the art department, but that is time wasted in two places.
For example, I have actually seen a completely computerized art department create film positives without registration marks. The screenmakers painstakingly taped the registration marks on the films when they could have been included in the artwork files to begin with. On computer, the marks would have taken less than thirty seconds to create. And this was in a market-leading shop with an international reputation!
I make these comments about communication based on the assumption that most employees take pride in their work and want to do it the best they can. If communication upstream and down is minimal, they will respond only to the information they get, which is likely to be incomplete or of questionable value. If they meet real live customers, preferably at the customers' site, they are likely to be motivated to make the product better and better. (This also applies to press operators and telephone-sales clerks and just about everyone else that comes in contact with the product.)
It is also in your interest to make sure that your artists come in frequent contact with their peers at other firms. I've run into a few managers who were scared to death of such contact, thinking that their subordinates would run right out and give away all the company secrets or find a better job. In reality, you don't have many secrets, and it shouldn't be too hard to let your artists know that details about sales information are proprietary. If your artists don't perceive that working for you is the best job that they could possibly have, keeping them from talking to others is not the solution.
In short, make sure that your people know that they are encouraged to go to user-group meetings where the hardware and software they use is the focus of discussion. Sure, they may occasionally meet a competitor there, but they will learn how to solve design-related problems. And if your competitors are out there learning all they can from the artists who are working for a local newspaper, why shouldn't your artists do the same?
One ideal place to turn for such cross fertilization is the computer users groups within the Screenprinting and Graphic Imaging Association International (SGIA). The SGIA Computer Users Group is a forum that allows SGIA members to share information about hardware and software problems and solutions. Among other resources, they publish an annual directory of screen printers who are willing to share their expertise in a wide range of programs, so you should be able to find a non-competitor who knows the ins and outs of almost any program, but still understands what screen printing is. For information about this group, contact Mike Robertson or Dave Schalton at the SGIA, 703-385-1335.
There aren't many classes that I would recommend for training your artists, but you can take that with a grain of salt. I'm just not really a classroom sort of person. A teacher in a classroom must present information that suits his expectation of the class as a whole because he or she can't deliver what is needed by each individual student. This means that for those whose knowledge level is above what the teacher presents, boredom sets in and the little gems that are included in the lesson may not be noticed. For students below the instructor's expectation, there is no way to benefit from facts that the student can't place in context, and little chance that the student will remember the details when the context is finally available. I find that an interactive approach is essential for delivering computer-designing information. And a forum in which information is proudly exchanged by everyone is best.
Finally, I really can't suggest the amount of training that may be appropriate. Obviously, you can't spend all of your time learning, but it is hard to imagine a time when training should stop. I've always felt an obligation to my employees to train them as well as I could, and I have a lot of former employees who are now in positions of responsibility of which I am very proud. Yes, you will find that you occasionally have trained someone to do a good job for a competitor. On the other hand, a reputation for quality training can be an excellent recruiting tool; and an organization committed to improving its quality and its people is a formidable competitor.