Cross-training employees is of great benefit to the employees being trained, their colleagues, and the company as a whole. Numerous companies are instituting cross-training programs, both as a way to increase productivity and as an adaptive strategy in an economy where businesses are having to get by with fewer employees.
"A company that cares about its culture, employee morale, and long-term employee loyalty is going to first need to deal with the communications and branding challenges of starting this program,” said Barrie Gross, founder of a San Francisco-based human resources training and consulting firm, and a former senior employment attorney. "[Businesses are] being smarter about not just trying to replace the people they lost, but having people trained so they can grow with the company when it begins to grow again. To have a future role in the company that may not exist yet should be important to any employee.”
Richard Hadden, founder of leadership training firm Contented Cows, said that cross-training is more like skill-sharing “because what you’re really doing is helping people acquire an additional set of skills… Cross-training is generally considered for the benefit of the organization, but really it’s for the benefit of the employee. You’re making them more valuable to the workplace as a whole, and to your company.”
But what exactly is cross-training, and how can it most effectively be achieved?
What Is Cross-training, and Why Is It Important to Businesses?
Cross-training employees is providing them with training in areas of your company that are outside of their exact job description, giving them the opportunity to learn invaluable skills that they would otherwise not have the chance to learn. For example, you could train someone who works in customer service on accounting or an HR employee on the supply chain process.
There are many benefits to cross-training. More than anything, any training offered to staff shows that an employer is investing in their employees, and cross-training is one of the best ways to make a return on your investment. Employees can add these skills to their resumes. They could find their true calling and feel they are better suited to one role over another — convenient if any internal vacancies open up.
Other benefits are that they get to meet new colleagues, which can make inter-office communications and collaborations easier, allaying any negative perceptions of other departments. If staff know more about the ins and outs of other departments, they will be able to help out if ever there are staff shortages.
What Is the Most Effective Method to Cross-train Employees?
Starting up a cross-training program requires organization, communication, and tact. Initially bringing up the subject of cross-training to employees can be a delicate matter, requiring trust, communication, and, above all, honesty. There’s a thin line between employees feeling that you are providing them with this valuable training because you trust them and feel that they are ready and able to take on more responsibility or that you are cross-training them in order to burden them with more tasks due to lack of staff.
The first step for companies planning to institute cross-training is to have a structure in place for the program. This will include a detailed schedule of which employees will learn which jobs. But it also means assuaging the feelings of both the trainee and trainer of the job. The biggest thing is to make sure both trainer and trainee realize that cross-training can be as much a benefit to them as it is to the company.
Making cross-training non-compulsory but providing a good incentive for doing it is a great way to go about it. Companies that provide some kind of motivation during the cross-training process have had positive results. This could include a financial remuneration beyond the workers’ normal pay or an attempt to gamify the process to make it more interesting.
In addition, it might be difficult to commit to cross-training and take an employee out of their current role in order to learn another, thereby leaving the company temporarily short-handed and perhaps throwing a wrench into the day’s activities — something that neither the company nor the employee would want to have to deal with. In this instance, perhaps a more drawn-out training held over the course of a week or two, with an hour or two daily sessions might work better, rather than having to take a whole day or more for training.
Another solution is online courses that can be stopped and continued and completed in the employees’ own time or on slower workdays. These are good for the theory part of the training, and the hands-on section can be completed at a later date.