To sustain and grow in the fast-evolving marketplace, big corporations to SMBs have started cross-training their workforce to control costs, stay productive, and stay at a competitive edge. What exactly is cross-fitting training? Noteworthy, to control cost and overhaul his family automotive business, Minneapolis-based Infiniti Store, Jeff Lupient, after being chaired as the interim general manager, implemented cross-training to make the business profitably running.
According to Lupient cross-training helps employees learn how to carry out the jobs of other associates while performing the roles for which they are being hired. Apart from aiming to help employees improve their existing skills, the approach boosts their adaptability to work efficiently in a changed condition. Moreover, it helps create a more skilled workforce, encourages them to collaborate with their team members to bring internal mobility, and enhances productivity
Key Benefits of Cross-Training Employees
The following are the leading advantages of implementing employee cross-training.
- Boosts employee skills
The biggest benefit of considering cross-training is that the program helps uplift the skill level of employees. Moreover, it makes them flexible and boosts their adaptability to perform in several roles according to the needs of the business.
- Overcome Organizational silos
Organizational silos are often perceived as evil for the business especially when the common approach of working in isolation –separated by specialization, department, and location hinders the team in collaboration. While sharing flawless information and communication is pivotal to reaching an organizational goal, the traditional silo-style work environment may appear challenging since many times workers or departments show unwillingness to exchange information or data.
This is where employee cross-training lets them learn to look at the ‘big picture’ or the overall benefit of the organization as a whole. This promotes collaboration and makes the company achieve its goals.
- Promotes empathy among teams
Providing employees with cross-training enables them to see the challenges and issues of other members and comply with their requests. The employee skill-building training becomes more productive when employees of one team carry out the jobs of another team member if they are sick or go on holiday.
By making teams more empathic to other departments and teams, the workforce makes the employer stay productive in challenging situations like when a business falls back in competition. Moreover, cross-training helps lessen overhead costs, due to greater work efficiency of employees which translates into profitability.
- Heartens cross-team collaboration
The next major benefit of cross-training employees is that it promotes employee engagement which is the key to better collaboration. The training program inspires employees to communicate and collaborate with their colleagues wholeheartedly. Better and healthier collaboration leads to higher employee productivity while enabling them to reach the common goal.
According to Jeff Lupient, to gain a competitive edge, the whole team needs to be well-familiar with the products, and services that the company deals in. This is most vital for businesses that are involved in sales, support, and other customer services. For example, to let his family business recoup its profitable stage, after making employees cross-trained, apart from handling different jobs himself including F & I, he worked together with his team members in sales and F & I process to boost customer experience. This also helped the whole team know their company in a better way.
