Cross Training

This is another one of those business school terms that is actually more complicated than it sounds. It’s also a much more powerful tool than it appears to be at first glance, with the potential to improve morale, increase employee retention, lower headcount and/or salary costs, and even preserve institutional memory. Unfortunately, it also has the potential to degenerate into a complete unholy mess if done incorrectly. Let’s take a closer look at the concept.

The basic idea of Cross Training is simple: each of the people who work for us should know how to do at least one job task beyond their own job description. Ideally, of course, everyone within the organization would know how to do every job within the organization, but this is rarely possible on a large scale, particularly where professionals or other highly-trained employees are involved. Most cross training programs will have to settle for teaching each employee how to perform the job tasks of an individual from another part of the company (e.g. another work group, department or division).

The effects on morale are fairly obvious: the cross training assignment helps to break up an employee’s routine and make their work more interesting; it also demonstrates that the company has an interest in keeping the employee around and thinks highly enough of him or her to believe that he or she can master a second job in addition to their own. This can fulfill the employee’s need for both recognition (the company thinks well of them) and self-actualization (the chance to learn new things and develop new skills), and possibly even security (the company is less likely to fire someone who can do multiple jobs for them), thus increasing job satisfaction and lowering turnover.

The effect on headcount and salary is also apparent: cross-trained personnel can cover for each other during breaks, meal periods, sick days, vacations, or other forms of leave, thus eliminating the need for an overage of personnel to cover this down time. In addition, if all of your employees know how to complete a specific task, the loss of one employee will not impact that task; someone else can handle the function until a replacement can be recruited and hired, and any of the cross-trained personnel can in turn instruct the replacement on how to do that task. Thus, this program spreads both expertise and institutional memory among many employees instead of entrusting it to a single individual.

A good example of what happens when you don’t cross train came up in conversation a few weeks back. The executor of an estate was trying to close out the investment accounts of the deceased so that he could distribute the funds to the heirs. Unfortunately, the investment company (which I won’t name) told him that they had only one person who dealt with this contingency procedure, and she was on vacation. The executor was stunned, and so was I when I heard the story. This was a company with thousands of employees, billions (or possibly hundreds of billions) in assets, television ads that run during major sporting events and on prime-time network shows, billboards, bus benches and heaven only knows what else, and they employ only ONE person who can process closing out an account in the event of the account holder’s death?

Even worse, that one person is an idiot; when she finally returned from vacation she managed to waste another week of the executor’s time by repeatedly losing documents, misplacing faxes, and so on. But that’s not really the point. They are violating the Second Rule of Business by annoying their customers (the executor had his own accounts with them) and their heirs (none of the heirs is ever likely to forget this outrage), but that’s not the point, either. The point is that unless the procedures in question are unbelievably complex and the investment company is critically understaffed, they could have avoided the entire situation with a program that would have cost them nothing more than the time of the person or persons being cross-trained.

Of course, a cross training program still has to be set up and managed intelligently in order to have proper effect; people will probably be limited to learning jobs appropriate to their own level of education and training (you can’t train the ditch-diggers to cover for the electrical engineers, and I wouldn’t suggest using one of the engineers to dig ditches), and they probably won’t be able to back up employees located in other time zones (unless all of the work in question is Internet-based). But within those limits there are very few management programs that have more potential upside for less cost…