Performance support

Performance support is help available during the work itself: a checklist, a short video, a decision tree or a visual work instruction, callable at the moment somebody needs it. The term job aid is often used as a synonym.

Not everything has to sit in somebody’s head. For operations that come round rarely or run to many steps, looking it up at the moment is more reliable than remembering a training from six months ago.

This is one of the cheapest ways to reduce errors, and at the same time the most often skipped. Organisations invest in a training day and nothing in the support afterwards, while the mistake usually gets made on a Tuesday morning during an operation somebody performs twice a year. A good rule of thumb: the rarer the task, the more it pays to support rather than to train.