“You tell me,” I said. “You see the new behavior extinguished after one week with no reinforcement. You only have two choices left. Positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement?”

Ryan was concerned that his training program wasn’t sticking. “Well, as long as they are doing it right, I shouldn’t have to say anything. So, I should probably watch them and correct the wrong behaviors.”

Ryan wasn’t lazy, but he really didn’t want to spend any more time than was necessary to make sure the training stuck.

“So, how are you going to monitor the behavior?” I continued.

Ryan was a touch frustrated as he was thinking this through. “I don’t know. I really don’t have the time to spend watching them all day, and by the way, we have 20 workstations in that unit. I would probably have to put three supervisors on just to do the watching. And if it’s the first week, they will mostly be doing it right, so catching them doing it wrong will be happen chance. But if I wait until after the first week to watch, it will be too late. I don’t know.”

“What if you considered positive reinforcement? Make positive comments when they do it right. Then, you could begin the reinforcement right away,” I suggested.

This had never occurred to Ryan in a million years. You could see a wave of relief come over his face. “You mean, I could hit each workstation, make a positive comment and leave?”

“Yep, make a positive comment, leave, go do some other stuff. Come back, make a positive comment, leave, go do some other stuff. You can bring some of the workstations together to watch one guy do it right. That’s one positive comment to five people at the same time. You could take a picture of someone doing it right, print it out, write good job across it with a marker and post it in his workstation. You can do lots of things quickly. Get the new behavior established and move on.” -TF