Steve Huey’s Blog

Today there is much talk about this latest round of layoffs creating more stress and more work for the people who “survived” the layoff.  The stress may be high but it can be lowered if the employees that are left are well Cross Trained.

Fast food managers know the cross training principle.  From the moment they walk in a store they are trained to cross train their crew.  I have seen a well cross trained crew handle 30% more volume with half the staff.  My belief is that team members who are cross trained in several functions like customer service, and training, or client marketing and brand marketing, or sales and marketing etc.  are exceptionally more valuable than single purpose workers.  They can handle more issues, work more efficiently, and can squeeze much needed leverage from the system.

If you are cross trained then the company can afford to pay you more or can afford to pay you in the first place.  As a manager you should seek out employees who can do more than one thing.  As a leader you must cross train your team to develop this type of leverage.  If you are a leader of a startup this is a fact of survival.

Tags: human resources, training

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 6:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.