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…
Showing posts with label Institutional Memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Institutional Memory. Show all posts
Monday, September 17, 2007
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Job Descriptions and Procedures Manual
In my last post, I mentioned the idea that Institutional Memory can be captured in permanent records outside of the employees themselves. Two of the common methods for doing so are humble documents you’ve probably seen around the office before, and never thought much of: Job Descriptions and Procedures Manuals. Like many other business school staples (mission statements, operating philosophies, business plans, etc.) these two documents are often seen as some kind of magic bullet, as in “All we have to do is document all of our procedures, and everything will be perfect!”
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Very few documents can effect real change in an organization just by existing, or even through the act of being created. In this case, job descriptions are often treated as mere busywork by line personnel – something that Human Resources requires us to write down for some reason of their own, probably because they are too lazy to do it. Quite often people will recycle the same description of a job for years, rather than update it to reflect the responsibilities of the position as it currently exists. Procedures manuals are even worse – too often, line personnel will be insulted at the very idea of creating a set of instructions for their jobs, as if this implies that they don’t know what they are supposed to be doing or are so disloyal and/or flighty that they might quit at any moment, without warning.
The truth is a bit less dramatic. A typical Job Description is simply a catalog of the tasks, functions and responsibilities of the job, along with an overview of anyone the position supervises and who the position reports to, salary and benefits offered, and so on. A well-written description will also include occasional and back-up duties, the positions backed up and supported by the position, and the minimum qualifications needed to do the job. If any of these things are not obvious, it is possible to add information to the job description or create additional/supplementary text to explain why a given position backs up someone in another department, or why a rather mundane accounting position requires CPA or MBA credentials, a background in auditing, and certification as a Level I Hazardous Materials Responder, for example.
Similarly, a procedures manual needs to document what the members of a work group actually do on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis, not just what senior management would have them do. If there is a chance (however unlikely) that all of the Accountants II will have to put on coveralls and respirators and go outside to mop up a toxic chemical spill at some point, then the procedures manual needs to explain how the unit goes about completing this task, and what the more junior accountants and bookkeepers are supposed to do while the Accountants II are occupied with the chemical spill. If a given team member has to fill out all of the office supply requisitions, then that individual’s job description should reflect that duty and the procedures manual should reference getting all office supply requests to that person before the deadline for each week’s order, whether this is an official job duty or not.
Ultimately, of course, there is no way to record all of the minutiae of a job in any written description; to really get all of the nuances of the position across you will need a more advanced and comprehensive way of transferring the experience…
But that’s our next topic…
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Very few documents can effect real change in an organization just by existing, or even through the act of being created. In this case, job descriptions are often treated as mere busywork by line personnel – something that Human Resources requires us to write down for some reason of their own, probably because they are too lazy to do it. Quite often people will recycle the same description of a job for years, rather than update it to reflect the responsibilities of the position as it currently exists. Procedures manuals are even worse – too often, line personnel will be insulted at the very idea of creating a set of instructions for their jobs, as if this implies that they don’t know what they are supposed to be doing or are so disloyal and/or flighty that they might quit at any moment, without warning.
The truth is a bit less dramatic. A typical Job Description is simply a catalog of the tasks, functions and responsibilities of the job, along with an overview of anyone the position supervises and who the position reports to, salary and benefits offered, and so on. A well-written description will also include occasional and back-up duties, the positions backed up and supported by the position, and the minimum qualifications needed to do the job. If any of these things are not obvious, it is possible to add information to the job description or create additional/supplementary text to explain why a given position backs up someone in another department, or why a rather mundane accounting position requires CPA or MBA credentials, a background in auditing, and certification as a Level I Hazardous Materials Responder, for example.
Similarly, a procedures manual needs to document what the members of a work group actually do on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis, not just what senior management would have them do. If there is a chance (however unlikely) that all of the Accountants II will have to put on coveralls and respirators and go outside to mop up a toxic chemical spill at some point, then the procedures manual needs to explain how the unit goes about completing this task, and what the more junior accountants and bookkeepers are supposed to do while the Accountants II are occupied with the chemical spill. If a given team member has to fill out all of the office supply requisitions, then that individual’s job description should reflect that duty and the procedures manual should reference getting all office supply requests to that person before the deadline for each week’s order, whether this is an official job duty or not.
Ultimately, of course, there is no way to record all of the minutiae of a job in any written description; to really get all of the nuances of the position across you will need a more advanced and comprehensive way of transferring the experience…
But that’s our next topic…
Friday, September 14, 2007
Institutional Memory
One of the technical terms you hear B-school types throwing around sometimes is “institutional memory,” which refers to the knowledge accumulated by all of the people who work for a given organization during the time they are employed. Some experts will include all of the working experience and job skills accumulated by the employees in the definition as well, but the term is more commonly applied to the facts, concepts and non-task experiences that the people working in a given group accumulate. Thus, a given retail employee may know everything you could ask for about inventory control, customer service, store maintenance, shipping and receiving, and running a cash register, but only someone who has actually worked in the Sav-on (now CVS) store in Silverlake California knows that you have to shift loads going up the conveyor belt to the storage attic to the left so they don’t fall off going around the turns.
That may not sound important in itself, unless you’ve ever had to clean up a few cases worth of corned beef brine from the floor after the cases fell and the cans shattered. Or, worse yet, had to fill out the accident report and the Worker’s Compensation forms after a case falls off and lands on someone’s head. Since it would cost more than the store’s net income for several years to have the conveyor system ripped out and replaced with something more functional, however, new employees being assigned to that unit will probably have to learn how to avoid this type of product spill for many years to come. It’s something that someone who has worked in that location would know, and could easily pass along to new employees, but which someone who has never worked in that unit would not know, regardless of how knowledgeable or how experienced they happen to be.
All right, it’s a rather slapstick way of making a serious point. In any business unit, whether it’s a low-end retail store or an elite University department, there are going to be odd bits of knowledge that can not be contained in any job description or procedures manual; that can only be obtained from actually doing the job and having the experiences that come with it. Maybe it’s how to keep the computers running; maybe it’s who to call in Payroll when the checks aren’t on time; maybe it’s what part of the day the office will be the least busy (best time to schedule tours, interviews, staff meetings, etc). It’s why experienced personnel will always out-perform new personnel, regardless of relative levels of training or ability, at least until the learning curve catches up to the level of the more experience workers.
It’s also the main reason why employee retention is so important. Certainly, the costs associated with recruiting and hiring new personnel can be huge, as can the costs of certification and/or formal training. But the biggest single drawback to new personnel is just learning curve – how long it takes the new people to learn the nuances of the job. This is just as true for management personnel as it is for the rank and file, by the way; General George S. Patton once said that it took at least five years for an Army officer to learn enough to begin earning his pay – and that some of them never did. Of course, there will always be those cases where an employee is costing the company more to retain than the cost to replace them, just as there will always be employees who receive job offers with salaries the company can’t match. But any Human Resources policy that does not take into consideration the learning curve and institutional memory factors is just (there’s no nice word for it) stupid.
Of course, the ideal situation would be to capture the institutional memory of a work group in some permanent form external to the workers themselves, so that it can be retained no matter how the employees come and go…
But that’s my next topic…
That may not sound important in itself, unless you’ve ever had to clean up a few cases worth of corned beef brine from the floor after the cases fell and the cans shattered. Or, worse yet, had to fill out the accident report and the Worker’s Compensation forms after a case falls off and lands on someone’s head. Since it would cost more than the store’s net income for several years to have the conveyor system ripped out and replaced with something more functional, however, new employees being assigned to that unit will probably have to learn how to avoid this type of product spill for many years to come. It’s something that someone who has worked in that location would know, and could easily pass along to new employees, but which someone who has never worked in that unit would not know, regardless of how knowledgeable or how experienced they happen to be.
All right, it’s a rather slapstick way of making a serious point. In any business unit, whether it’s a low-end retail store or an elite University department, there are going to be odd bits of knowledge that can not be contained in any job description or procedures manual; that can only be obtained from actually doing the job and having the experiences that come with it. Maybe it’s how to keep the computers running; maybe it’s who to call in Payroll when the checks aren’t on time; maybe it’s what part of the day the office will be the least busy (best time to schedule tours, interviews, staff meetings, etc). It’s why experienced personnel will always out-perform new personnel, regardless of relative levels of training or ability, at least until the learning curve catches up to the level of the more experience workers.
It’s also the main reason why employee retention is so important. Certainly, the costs associated with recruiting and hiring new personnel can be huge, as can the costs of certification and/or formal training. But the biggest single drawback to new personnel is just learning curve – how long it takes the new people to learn the nuances of the job. This is just as true for management personnel as it is for the rank and file, by the way; General George S. Patton once said that it took at least five years for an Army officer to learn enough to begin earning his pay – and that some of them never did. Of course, there will always be those cases where an employee is costing the company more to retain than the cost to replace them, just as there will always be employees who receive job offers with salaries the company can’t match. But any Human Resources policy that does not take into consideration the learning curve and institutional memory factors is just (there’s no nice word for it) stupid.
Of course, the ideal situation would be to capture the institutional memory of a work group in some permanent form external to the workers themselves, so that it can be retained no matter how the employees come and go…
But that’s my next topic…
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