I’m a big fan of documentation. You only need to think of all the things we don’t know about pre-historic people because they didn’t write; or of the lives of any humans since, when their daily lives were either not recorded or the records destroyed in fires or disintegrated as the years and centuries passed. How much incredible human history needs to be excavated and guessed that could be read!
Same goes for work. Documenting processes removes the need for guess work and time wasted reinventing the wheel. You’d think this is something so obvious that everyone did it, yet in my time both coaching people to do this and onboarding to existing roles I’ve found that the majority don’t do it.
There’s many reasons to not documenting one’s work. The most common is that people simply don’t think about it. Once you know how something’s done, you don’t think of it as a step-by-step process; instead, each action morphs into a logical sequence. But if we took time to think of how we operated when we first started, we’d realize that we carefully completed Step 1, then Step 2, and so on. Another reason is if you’re the only person doing something and you don’t ever need someone to cover for you. I cannot think of a white-collar job where this would ever be the case, but perhaps there are roles where you can automate certain things to happen during your vacation – if you know of one, let me know in the comments!
The worst reason to opting out of documenting one’s work is the fear of being replaced. I’ve encountered people whose absences, whether sick leaves or holidays, left the company wondering how things work because no one knew, and the person in question had refused to leave any guidance. I find the replaceability argument ridiculous, frankly – unless it’s something a machine can do with minimal human oversight (I’m talking an hour per week, tops), you shouldn’t be replaceable. I suspect many people with this fear aren’t getting their hours in with their existing tasks and fear that exposing the process for doing their tasks also exposes the limited time required and either incurs more work or, if indeed not a very time-consuming process, to being laid off. You may wonder how these kinds of can exist; one reason is that when companies grow and teams become more specialised, a generalist role is stripped off its breadth, bit by bit, until it’s a skeleton role and no one really realises that, except for the employee in question. Another is that companies are bad at estimating how much time a new task takes, and they employ a new full-time employee for what might actually be only a part-time job. A third reason, somewhat similar to the first, is that the company stops doing something and an employee’s responsibilities aren’t reviewed when one part of their job is eliminated.
Another lengthy introduction to my actual topic: cross-training your employees. I started to talk about documentation because it is essential to effective and efficient cross-training. It’s essential because it makes it easier to train someone when you’ve got clear training materials and How To sections; it’s also essential because it gives colleagues the chance to ask questions and make improvements. When we’ve done something for a long time, we easily stop evaluating the process because it’s become second nature to us. Someone new to the topic will likely find inefficiencies and be able to make the processes better (perhaps a subconscious reason to why some people are so unwilling to train others, because they know they may need to learn something new and admit that the existing way of doing things isn’t optimal).
But why should you cross-train your employees? Any initiative is likely to be successful both in implementation and ideation if it has a clear business objective. But first, what I mean by ‘cross-training:’ employees in the same organisation, whether in the same team or not, both explaining to others what they do at the organisation, and teaching them to do the same, at least to some extent. As an example, a sales person explaining to a developer how they contact prospects and how they interact with them to make a sale; or the developer showing the sales person how a new product feature comes to be, from ideation to testing to production.
In my opinion, there’s at least three good business reasons to cross-training employees: reducing slow downs due to absences; optimising roles and reducing redundancy; and keeping employees happy and motivated by supporting active and meaningful learning at work. Let’s look at each in more detail.
Cross-train for leave substitutes
Many organisations have identified slow periods where less gets done due to holiday seasons. In many European countries, most employees take their vacations around the same time in the summer and in December, and in Finland for example, nothing is expected to happen in July-August as a matter of fact. Still, many teams try ensure that essential tasks are taken care of and that at least one member of the team is working at all times. This isn’t possible when there is only one person in the organisation who can do a specific task, or a set of them. Imagine only one person knowing how to do payroll, taking off for a whole month. Even if they automate the process, what if there’s an error? What if the payroll provider needs information from the organisation, but no one knows how to find it? It needn’t be as significant an issue as that. Projects may be held up if the people left in charge don’t have the necessary information to make decisions, for instance over the budget. Customer requests may go unanswered for days and weeks if no one realises they need to check in to a shared email inbox – not to mention if they don’t even know one exists.
Unplanned absences shine a hotter spotlight on the issue. When someone goes on sick leave unexpectedly, whether for a long time or just so suddenly they don’t have time for a proper handover, and there is no documentation on how to carry out the person’s task, or no one trained to take over at short notice, the situation is much worse than when it’s known someone will be away for a long time. Cross-training team members in one another’s duties helps them cover for one another without it burdening the sub too much to carry on both their own work and the added tasks from a colleague.
Cross-train for optimised roles
You’ve heard of burnout (too much work), but have you heard of boreout? The latter can cause the same level of despair and lead to the exact same outcome as burnout, but it’s caused by the lack of meaningful things to do at work, and just a lack of work overall. For a slacker, having a full-time job with full-time pay on paper and a part-time job in reality is the dream, but many people who find themselves all of a sudden completely underutilised feel anxiety over it. Having to sit at your laptop for eight hours a day, just waiting for some work to come, is a strange, even humiliating feeling, and something no organisation should let happen. Regular review of workload and roles is a good way to ensure no one is left on standby mode, and that no one is overheating.
Cross-training helps people understand the whole, and this is business case for cross-training number two. The bigger an organisation gets, the more specialised the roles become because you can afford more people to do a more niche thing, albeit with the expectation that the niche produce real value. The more people you have, the harder it is to keep everyone connected and aware of what’s happening on the other side of the organisation – or even the same team. Especially in a role revision situation, cross-training within a team or function helps rearranging duties and refining roles, because several people have the same skillsets and can more easily take on a new responsibility. Rearranging duties helps ensure no one is under- or overworked, and at best means that no one has to go on sick leave, and that you don’t have hire a new employee and spend money and time on a recruitment process and training a new employee.
Cross-train for employee satisfaction and better retention
When I started at my previous role, I was often told by my then boss that I was doing a lot more than expected. I told them that it was my personal view that if, a year in, I was still doing the exact same things as when I started, I would have not done well. I felt that in that role, not having trained my colleagues to do things I could do but they couldn’t, and not establishing clear processes that sped things up and increased visibility and collaboration, would have meant underperforming. Not everyone has that approach to their work; some are probably quite content to keep doing the same thing for years on end.
But I argue that most people aren’t. Most people like to learn. The third business case for cross-training employees is increasing their job satisfaction and attaining a higher retention rate. It’s easier to make a lateral move inside an organisation that to try make the jump between companies. It’s easier because when you’re in, the people around you know you and see what you’re capable of. The company won’t be taking the same kind of a chance on you in cross-training you for a few weeks on the side and seeing if you’re learning than hiring you from outside with no experience (no matter how much I hate this reality! You should give potential the chance!).
“But we hired you for Job A, not Job B!” Fair enough – maybe it’s not possible for A to take on B. But cross-training doesn’t have to mean a complete change in the job; it can be a rearrangement of responsibilities, as argued above. But what if A and B were interested in one another’s jobs and wanted to switch, to broaden their skillsets? Companies need to encourage open discussion over roles, tasks and aspirations, and make sure no one in penalised for showing an interest in intra-company growth. It’s natural to grow bored of something, especially if you are a quick learner and have already made improvements within your existing scope. An employee with experience in many teams and functions within a company may be your most valuable one, for both their factual skills and knowledge, but also their connections.
“But what if they just want to learn a new skill for free and leave for another job?” If they’re seeking to learn new skills just to jump ship, then you’ve probably got a problem already. An employee thinking this way is likely eager to leave either way. In fact, thinking that encouraging real learning (read: not unimaginative internal training videos where you can’t ask questions or apply what ‘you’ve learned’ in practice) is risky for your business is risky business. Employees who feel they are constantly learning, whether by going deeper or by widening their spectrum, are much happier and likely to want to stay.
But how to enable cross-training in a pro-business way? That’s a How To for another blog post!
Sidetracked 