Is Your Staff Cross-Trained?

Would your organization survive if you lost a key employee? Through our employee surveys, team assessments and coaching, we hear clients frequently say that their organization has silos. Sometimes they indicate it is just certain teams, while other times it is the organization as a whole and part of the culture. We know that silos are detrimental to the organization.  One key to keeping areas siloed is when information is contained to just one key employee or team (i.e., information hoarding). If the key employee is out; the team, processes and information comes to a halt.

With the pandemic, it brought out a need, more than ever, for employees to be cross-trained with employees working remotely, in office, in quarantine, or out sick. If critical functions were only handled by one key employee, some departments found themselves in a bind. 

We have conducted Employee Engagement Surveys with over 100,000 employees. Organizations in Peter Barron Stark Companies’ Best of the Best Benchmark are consistently rated higher in the competencies of cross-departmental teamwork. Organizations that are strong in cross-departmental teamwork have employees with a broader knowledge than just their own job and an understanding of how the different departments and the jobs in it all connect to better serve the customer as well as each other. Organizations that grasp the importance of cross-training reap the benefits and gain a huge competitive advantage.

Not only does cross-training provide advantages to organizations, but to their employees as well.

Organizational advantages include:

• Coverage for an employee when they are sick or out on vacation
• Coverage to provide backfill when a qualified employee cannot be found in the shrinking workforce
• A smaller workforce is needed since employees can cover multiple functions based on the organization’s need
• Employees who are able to provide training on multiple skills
• Increased cross-departmental teamwork
• Development of future leaders

Employee advantages include:

• Increased morale due to a deeper understanding of how the business works and knowing they make a significant difference in the business’s success
• Opportunity to learn new skills
• Greater opportunity for a promotion
• Higher chance they will not be let go in tough economic times
• Prevents stagnation
• Greater job variety

If you are emerging from the pandemic and realizing that you have a few areas that are in need of some cross-training, the following 7 tips will help your team successfully take advantage of these benefits by implementing cross-training:

1 – Identify the specific critical tasks for which cross-training is needed. You can look at the need from a few different angles. 

• • What needs do our customers have that could be improved if multiple team members knew how to meet them?
  • Where are we vulnerable?  If this employee was to get hit by a bus today, are people already trained, ready to execute and get the job successfully accomplished? Ensure every job is backed up.
  • As you review your team member’s performance, what are the next logical steps to help them build their skills and increase their organizational value?

2 – Conduct a gap analysis: Determine what skills and knowledge are needed to successfully get the job done. Then, identify the employee’s current level of knowledge and skills. Develop a learning plan based on the gap. 

3 – Identify the right people to cross-train. Some team members love to learn new information and skills, while others are more comfortable completing the same tasks over and over. Here is your challenge as a leader: if you have a person in a critical position who refuses to cross-train others, you are being held hostage and putting the future health of your team or organization in jeopardy. Information hoarding kills cross-departmental teamwork and squashes creativity and innovation. If your competition has strong cross-departmental teamwork and your organization does not, you are going to be both vulnerable and at a significant disadvantage. Information hoarders seem to forget that we are all on the same team.

4 – Create the right environment: Information hoarders actually operate from a place of fear. To eliminate this fear, align the vision of cross-training with the goal of improving teamwork and service to the customers. This should help eliminate the feeling that information hoarders have that by sharing their information and teaching others their skills, the program is designed to eliminate them.

5 – Adjust workload: Employees learning a new skill will take longer to accomplish the task than a veteran of the position. Adjust their schedule temporarily until they are up to speed. 

6 – Reward team members for learning new skills and practicing collaborative behaviors. People do what they are rewarded and/or recognized for doing.

7 – Share information hoarders with your best competitor: If an employee is unwilling to train others, share information and work well cross-departmentally, you may be a lot better off sharing them with your best competitor and screwing up another organization’s strategic plan. 

Cross-training is good for the employees, the leaders, and for the organization. Put these seven tips into action and it will help you in building an organization that is rated by your employees as being the Best of the Best.