Cross training employees, especially for your small business, can be crucial for increasing productivity and growth. Managing a small team can feel limiting if you don’t have distinct functions to keep your business a float and scaling. Crossing-training among your existing team can have several benefits, which includes enhancing employee skills, growing their knowledge bank, boosting employee morale, and ultimately improving business outputs. Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that the average cost to hire an employee is over $4k, making cross-training a cost-effective alternative—putting your business in a favorable position that maximizes profitability.
We understand the complexities of allocating enough resources to ensure your team is provided with what they need to keep operations booming. Cross training is one such way of preparing your team to pivot in their roles should they need to. With a small team, it is likely you already have an all hands on deck approach. Being strategic and intentional about how their roles, responsibilities and shared skills are divided up can give your business the extra push it needs to eventually hire the right individuals to further expand your operations.
Why Small Businesses Cross Train Their Employees
Small businesses often have to cross-train existing employees when hiring additional staff isn't feasible. This could be due to budget constraints or the lack of qualified candidates. While it's a cost-effective alternative to hiring, the goal shouldn’t be to exploit workers. There are genuine benefits to cross-training for both employer and employee, but understanding it’s not a permanent solution is key.
Teaching an employee parts of other job functions and expanding on their roles and responsibilities can help them become better managers when the time comes. Managing multiple staff, and multiple staff jobs, requires someone to have a basic understanding of each role, and how they work together and separately. Cross training is one of the best ways to achieve this with employees you see being promoted in the future. Promoting from within is quite common for SMBS, especially as business owners aim to remain competitive and scale.
Cross training employees can prevent a breakdown of your operations should employees leave or become absent. Cross training ensures your employees can pick up the slack if things get busy, one employee is out, or there are any other short staffing days. Others can fill in, keeping the business operations running smoothly without a hitch. It's not just about covering absences; it's also about creating a seamless flow of work where the business doesn't have to pause or suffer because one person isn't there.
Benefits of Cross Training
There are several beneficial reasons for cross-training your team. Small businesses can thrive on the versatility and the commitment of their team members. By cross-training employees you’re teaching them how to handle multiple roles. For small businesses like yours, it isn't just a strategy; it's often a necessity. Data suggests that small businesses that focus on employee development see a 24% increase in employee performance.
Budget-Friendly: Cross-training employees can also allow for a budget-friendly overarching strategy for employee retention and training. When you reduce time spent on hiring new people, you save on recruitment and on-boarding costs. Leveraging the team you already have and teaching them different jobs can be a lot cheaper than finding, hiring, and training new staff every time you need a new skill in the mix.
Risk Reduction: When more than one person knows how to perform a job, it enables risk-reduction for your business. Should someone get sick or leave, you're not stuck in trying to pivot in real-time but rather proactive in finding a solution before it occurs. It's important to not put all your eggs in one basket. One person's absence shouldn’t throw a wrench in your operations.
Better Customer Service: When everyone on your team knows a bit of everything, your customers benefit the most. The process of providing customer support can be seamless so customers always get the help they need, no matter who's on duty. Enhancing your customer service can have a positive impact on your business bottom line when customers have positive sentiments from engaging with your business.
Employee Retention: People like to learn new things and grow in areas they want to improve. Any opportunity where your employees feel they can get better at their jobs is a win for you. When they can grow and aren’t bored, they're more likely to stay put. Employee retention minimizes time, effort, and money spent to replace them. Investing in your team's future through cross-training is a good way to keep them around.
How to Cross Train Your Employees
Implementing a cross-training program can seem daunting, but with a well-thought-out plan, it's entirely achievable. With executing on anything, you must first prepare with a plan. By planning you allow for ideating and considering the steps needed to bring that plan to life. Let’s explore how you can effectively build your cross training program.
Assess Skills and Needs: Begin by assessing the skills of your current employees. By doing so you’ll be able to identify the gaps in skills that could be filled through cross-training. Prioritize the skills you’ll want to cross train on first and lean on the specialists, for each function, on your team to lead the cross-training efforts within their wheelhouse.
Set Specific Goals: Define what success looks like for your cross-training program. Set specific, measurable goals for each employee involved in the training. These goals can be which positions they can cover, what skills are being strengthened, etc. Align these goals with the broader objectives of your business (Promoting employees, Saving for a store expansion, etc.).
Develop a Curriculum: Create a structured training outline that details the skills to be learned and the methods to be used. Include manuals, guides, and any resources that will aid in the learning process. Determine if any external training resources or courses are needed and available.
Hire Mentors or Tutors as needed: Evaluate the need for specialized expertise to bridge skill gaps that cannot be covered in-house. Consider your local community and network of resources for those expertise. By offering up your own expertise, they’ll be more likely to participate in your cross-training program. Use websites like LinkedIn, Upwork, or Fiverr to find skilled freelancers who offer training and tutoring services in specific areas of expertise. Establish specific learning objectives and outcomes to ensure the mentoring or tutoring align with your business goals.
Schedule Training Sessions: Plan the training schedule so that it doesn't conflict with the peak operational hours of the business. Set realistic time frames for each training session to maintain attention and effectiveness. Consider staggered training schedules to ensure the business is adequately staffed at all times.
Create Feedback Loops: Implement a system where trainees and trainers can provide feedback about the training process. Use this feedback to adjust the training curriculum or schedule as needed.
Documentation: Keep detailed records of what training has been done, by whom, and the progress made. Use this documentation to track ROI and the impact of cross-training on the business. These will come in handy when you decide to cross-train new team members, retain training methodologies and expand upon your frameworks.
Review and Revise the Plan: Regularly review the plan to ensure it meets the changing needs of the business and staff. Be open to revising the plan based on feedback and the outcomes you are seeing. By following these steps, you'll be able to create a robust cross-training plan that benefits both the employees and the business as a whole. It’s about investing in your team to build a more resilient, flexible, and skilled workforce.
When to Move Beyond Cross Training
While cross-training is a good strategy that comes with plenty of benefits, it is not a long-term solution. Scaling your business and hiring the right team members to build out your operation and functions should ultimately be your goal.
Offering employees the opportunity to expand on their wheelhouse and expertise is a great incentive for employee retention, with it, there should be goals to promote that employees so they are elevated in their roles and responsibilities, and ultimately their pay as well. Remaining stuck in the same role while acquiring more responsibilities and no sight of actual growth could make employees grow resentful and eventually quit.
Early fatigue: Team members will start to show signs of fatigue, hinting at the early stages of burnout.
Emerging Skill Needs: As time progresses, you may start to notice that there is a greater need for specialized skills. Certain skill sets may become a requirement but not available within the team. This is where having dedicated roles, functions and responsibilities become important. Too many teammates overlapping on skills could lead to a breakdown in areas that need more attention.
Task Delays: Tasks may start to take longer to complete. This could be an indication that the workload is becoming too complex for your cross-trained staff.
Morale Observations: There may also be a subtle and less favorable shift in team morale. This could possibly be due to the continuous challenge of handling multiple roles.
As your business continues to grow and become more profitable, make sure to invest in hiring the right individuals with distinct roles, specialties and responsibilities so your business continues to scale.
Key Takeaways
Cross-training your employees can have many benefits to keep your small business afloat and running. It can allow for minimal disruption of business operations, smooth transition between individuals and teams, and seamless customer service should an employee be absent or leave permanently. When more than one individual is knowledgeable in a specific area or function, they can rotate and fill in the gaps whenever necessary. You can save on the effort required to hire and train new employees, minimize risk of errors, adding to the quality of work, products and services you can produce. It can also enable employee growth, professional development, improve employee morale and overall retention.
However, don’t be remiss to think that cross training should be a long-term strategy or fix-all solution. It is not. As you scale, so should your team by having distinct roles, responsibilities and specialties to avoid employee burnout, and fatigue. Your cross-training program should be leveraged to document training models, best practices, protocol, employee expertise, and coaching to ultimately build and grow your team.