How to Turn Employee Training into Cross Training

According to MindTools.com, Cross-training is the practice of training your people to work in several different roles or to do tasks outside their typical responsibilities.

A great example is training someone from your Customer Support Team some best practices in SaaS Sales & Customer Success Management - like how to  upsell or cross sell.

Unlike Employee Training, these roles or skills are typically not mentioned in job descriptions or included in performance reviews. The ambiguous responsibilities in a cross-trained organization make managers and People teams less likely to adopt these practices despite the clear business advantages.

Benefits of Cross Training vs Employee Training

By equipping your employees to know how to work in more than one area, you create a flexible work environment that enhances your ability to thrive during employee absences or role vacancies. In addition to enhanced operations, employees will value obtaining new skills, and team collaborations will increase productivity.

4 Key Signs your Employee Training needs Cross Training

Keep an eye out for these red flags. If you spot at least two, it might be worth considering rolling out a formal cross-training program with one of the tools below:
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1 - Business functions halt when a team member is out of the office or on vacation. 
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2 - Difficulty in teamwork on highly specialized or cross-functional projects.
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3 - Limited employee skill sets prevent traditional career development opportunities.
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4 - Inability to reach company goals consistently across departments.

Time Saving Tools to Transition from Employee Training to Cross-Training

Typically a company's most significant concern with cross-training is the amount of perceived time it will take to train employees successfully. 

Companies already spend enough time and money onboarding employees that the fear of more training can sound expensive.

Below are 3 SaaS companies that simplify training and development while saving time.

Notion
Notion is a project management and note-taking software. Notion is designed to help members of a company or organization coordinate deadlines, objectives, and assignments for efficiency and productivity.

Asana
Asana helps you boost team accountability, plan with confidence, and hit deadlines every time.  Work anytime, anywhere with Asana. Keep remote and distributed teams, and your entire organization focused on their goals, projects, and tasks. 

Driveway
‍Driveway does the heavy lifting for you by automatically creating a step-by-step guide for your workflow, with screenshots and descriptions. Your team can park and settle into easy and efficient training with its customizable screenshot features.  As a bonus, its Driveway feature allows you to experience a live view video function for engaging and hands-on training.