Cross- training employees can be a catalyst to a huge improvement in workforce productivity of any business. Here are the 5 main benefits of cross-training in the warehouse sector, however the advantages do not stop here, they are endless!
What does it mean to cross train an employee?
Cross-training is building the skills of your employees so that they can work in several different roles and carry out tasks even if they aren’t part of their main daily responsibilities. As a result, you, as the employer, can increase productivity in the workplace by making the maximum use out of the latent talents and skillsets of your employees.
For example, when summer is approaching and people are rushing into travel agents to book their last-minute holidays, if employees who usually handle telephone customer service enquiries are also trained to handle walk-in customers, then the travel agency will be more able to handle the increased demand.
Similarly, in the warehouse sector if someone in your team who usually works in production work could also operate forklift trucks you could move them temporarily to the loading team if there is a spike in demand. This prevents orders falling behind and increases the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your team.
Cross-training, specifically in the warehouse sector, is something that gets spoken about more than it is actually implemented. What is the main reason for that? Because people are simply unaware of the multitude of gain generated from this method. Hopefully after reading this blog post, you will be part of the percentage who are aware of the benefits, and will be tempted to use that knowledge to your advantage!
1. Great return on investment
The key to cross-training making a great return on investment is realising that the talent you are trying to outsource is most likely already within your business. Once you’ve had this realisation and act upon it, you are likely to see ways to boost to your bottom line.
2. Improved employee retention
A study conducted at the university of Warwick via Forbes found that on average, happy and engaged employees are 12% more productive than their unhappy counterparts. Cross-training has a significant effect on individual employee happiness because with a broader range of skills employees will feel as though they are being invested in and in return will become more engaged. Continuously focusing on the skillset of your existing employees rather than trying to recruit new employees with prior qualifications, will keep long term employees more committed to stick around.
3. Reduced impacts when employees are absent
This is a fairly straightforward benefit but often people do not realise the extent of a positive impact having cross-trained employees can have when absence occurs. For example, if your business has 10 employees and each of them have a total of 25 holidays per year that would be a total of 250 days a year where at least 1 person’s list of responsibilities are not getting completed. Does that sound efficient to you?
When your work-force is “cross-fit”, you will be able to substitute somebody from a less busy shift or a different sector who has the knowledge to cover for the absent employee. As a result, a significant increase to the number of responsbilities and tasks that are being completed will arise and the productiveness\output of the company will expand.
Ideally, even in a small company, you would have three people or more who could do any single job – even if only to ‘hold the fort’ professionally for a shift or a day. There is a direct link between the competency of your people and the confidence your customers have in you as a supplier.
4. Better employee collaboration
There are two types of employees. Those who have just expertise in one area (not cross-trained) and those who have expertise in one particular aspect but also still have a broad knowledge of other aspects in the company (cross-trained). When you are the non-cross trained type of employee you are hyper-focused to that one particular area and therefore find it difficult to collaborate with those in other sectors of your company.
Good collaboration is crucial within a company as it allows you and a team to solve problems together, speeding up the process of finishing a task and avoiding breakdowns in communication.
5. Makes your company more agile
The actual process of cross-training employees may reveal areas of strengths and weaknesses in employees. Throughout the on-the-job-training hidden talents and strengths may be revealed that means people would work better in another area or field of the business. You can then change people around accordingly. This makes your company more agile and responsive to change as-well as increasing flexibility when needing to fill last minute absences.
Being an agile company has a range of benefits such as more resilience, quicker decision making, more collaborative and also quick mobilization.
How Key Performance Training can help your business with cross-training
Key Performance Training based in Swindon and RTITB Approved, can unlock your potential with novice, refresher, experienced courses in Forklift Training, First Aid, Health and Safety and Fire Marshall Training, amongst others, at regular times throughout the year in a specifically designed training centre or on-site at your own location , amongst others, at regular times throughout the year in a specifically designed training centre or on-site at your own location if you prefer. From individual training to large scale corporate roll outs.
The theme
for the 2020 International Women’s Day campaign is #EachforEqual. An equal
world is an enabled world.
How to enter the competition
Take a photograph or selfie in front of a forklift truck with your arms in the position shown and add it to your social media account. This can be on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn. Remember to use ALL THREE hashtags #IWD2020 #EachforEqual #KPT and tag the relevant Key Performance Training Account on that platform, or that of David Gearon or Bob Hayward.
How the winner will be decided:
The winner will be the person whose social media post gets the most likes and shares. The photograph must be of the person who owns that social media account, they must have their arms in the position demonstrated, the post must contain all three hashtags and tag Key Performance or one of the two owners.
Why are
we doing this?
At Key Performance Training, we are choosing to challenge stereotypes, broaden perceptions, and seek to be a pathway to better equal employment opportunities.
In the last two years, only five of the 80 delegates who have become qualified forklift operators through Key Performance Training were ladies. There is no reason for forklift operating to be the preserve of our male colleagues. There is no reason that anyone, male or female, must be big, strong or bulky to operate a forklift. The fact is that Forklift Trucks are just as suitable for men and women to drive as are cars.
A career as
a Forklift driver is an underrated profession and often overlooked by women who
may not recognise the high demand for Forklift operators. Anyone over 16 can
drive forklift truck and earnings are above average for warehouse and logistic
roles. Forklift driving can be a great pathway into better employment for
everyone #EachforEqual
The International Women’s Day 2020 campaign theme is #EachforEqual. An equal world is an enabled world.
At Key Performance, we are choosing to challenge stereotypes and broaden perceptions. We seek to be a pathway to better equal employment opportunities.
Anyone over 16 can drive a forklift truck. As the career employment opportunities are plentiful and earnings above average for warehouse and logistic roles. At £21,000 to £23,000 forklift driving can be a great pathway into better employment.
In the last two years, only five of our 80 trainees were ladies. These 80 delegates became qualified forklift operators through Key Performance Training and the vast majority went straight into paid work. This number, five from 80, is obviously not proportional to the population of people working in the logistics and warehousing industry. And yet there is no reason for forklift operating to be the preserve of our male colleagues. There is no reason that anyone, male or female, must be big, strong or bulky to operate a forklift. The fact is that Forklift Trucks are just as suitable for men and women to drive as are cars.
Job expansion in the manufacturing, warehousing and logistics sector looks promising for the economy. What does this news mean for the women out of work? Male workers have dominated the industrial workforce and have naturally gravitated towards these types of jobs, while women can easily take advantage of these job opportunities.
A career as a Forklift driver is an underrated profession and often overlooked by women. Many do not realise there is a high demand for Forklift operators. Operators drive Forklifts and use them carry heavy loads and stack pallets onto warehouse shelving or trucks. One can earn a respectable salary, opportunities for promotion. and enjoy flexible shifts as a Forklift operator. In order to secure employment, a training course and certification is mandatory but easy to obtain. A novice course takes only five days and you could be working the very next week…
So, to challenge that false assumption and in support of International Women’s Day Key Performance Training are putting on a LADIES ONLY forklift taster session. Friday 6th March at Unit 1 Headlands Trading Estate, Swindon, SN2 7JQ.
The free two-hour session has been designed to help people decide if they could operate a forklift truck and whether they could earn more as a forklift driver. We invite all ladies to come and try out some simple moves of both a Reach and Counterbalance Truck as well as to meet an Employment Agency to discuss the job opportunities locally right now.
For more information contact Bob Hayward or David Gearon at Key Performance Training #IWD2020 #EachforEquality
At Key Performance Training, we are of course completely biased in our opinion, that a training course with us here will most certainly improve anyone’s life chances and ability to move forward. We consider that learning to be a Forklift Operator gets you onto the pathway to employment. It can be instrumental in getting to a job to start with. Any job for a new novice forklift truck driver is worth taking because it provides you with invaluable experience. Once you have six months or one year under your belt you can look for a better job because you know have a track record as a Forklift Driver. Once established in that better job you can start to build a career with further training and promotions. Any Job – Better Job – A Career; this ABC is the say of satisfying the need to improve self-worth which can only be got through a sense of achievement and personal growth.
Achievement and personal growth in turn can be pushed forward in leaps and bounds by choosing the right training course specifically tailored to you, it doesn’t matter what stage of your life you are at and it doesn’t really matter if your life’s ambition is to be a forklift truck driver or even to go on with further training to eventually become the trainer yourself, the fact is that training is truly the only way to improve your lot in life.
Training and more importantly the right training package will also give you personal confidence and the satisfaction of knowing that you have got not only the qualification, the actual bit of paper that says you have done it, but you have also applied yourself, made a decision and stuck with it until you obtained the end result.
Success measured how we do here at Key Performance Training is that it’s not so much where you end up more what you do every day all those little baby steps that add up to one giant leap for the improvement of your life.
Key Performance Training as specialists in this area have the skill set and techniques available to truly draw out of you the best Forklift Driver out of you that you can imagine. With Key Performance Training, even though there at tough tests to pass; both theory and practical – with Key Performance Training you never fail. Why? Because if you do not pass the first time we will continue to train you for free until you do pass.
Training and development is of course a fundamental part of any profession, not only does it help you improve your performance but it will allow you to perform better within your organisation thus helping your employer meet its own goals.
Even when you take you tri-annual refresher programmes, Key Performance Training will give you new skills making you as an individual more efficient at your job, in fact, it will make you truly more capable of handling situations that you would not necessarily have been confident in prior to taking one of our training courses.
Developing new skills within your own repertoire will also make you a much more valuable proposition to any new potential employer, putting you in the driving seat, quite literally, turning that first “Any Job” into a Better Job and then on into a Career.
A career as a trained fork lift truck driver can be one of the most fulfilling careers in the construction or distribution industry, key performance training specialise in training for the fork lift truck drivers. You can be sure that training for a career as a qualified forklift truck driver will assure you of a career that will span a lifetime. Almost everything in every home or business premises was once on a forklift truck. Even the simple pencil, was in a box, along with a few others, which were all on a pallet and that pallet was moved more than once by a forklift truck.
Almost everybody who runs a successful company will also run training for their employees the ability for their workers to advance themselves not only will this give the company more valuable resource is in the form of better able staff will also promote a greater feeling of well-being in the employee which will in turn enable to live a better life and so training in effect becomes the catalyst for happier workers a better and more effective workforce and much higher productivity within the company.
Within the forklift driving industry historically it has been viewed that individuals will have less of a leaning towards academia and this could have contributed towards their decision to seek employment within this industry in the first place, maybe school and learning wasn’t for them, this in turn has over the years lead to a belief that those operatives working within this industry would struggle with training courses, however nothing could be further from the truth.
More and more our industry is being seen as a professional career path and therefore training within the industry has to offer enough scope to allow workers to feel that there is possibility of progression, this in turn will benefit the industry by helping to retain valuable experienced forklift truck drivers and who knows, in time they may go on to become the next generation of trainers themselves, certainly there can be no replacement for true knowledge and experience in any industry with this one being no different.
There are so many opportunities arising within our industry with warehousing constantly on the increase, the construction, retail industry and many more are all requiring the skill of professional forklift truck drivers, therefore there will constantly be a need for Centres of excellence in training to put on high-quality up skilling opportunities for forklift truck drivers. As such annual refreshers may become the norm rather than the current practise of only refreshing once every three years.
At Key Performance Training we of course know that training is most definitely the key ingredient in making life for individuals more successful and pleasurable, investing your time and of course your money in training is actually to invest in your or your employees life. Your future and of course your family’s future. A Reach Driver typically earns more than a Picker and Packer. LGV Drivers earn more than many office workers.
Training at work was mostly seen as some kind of either reward or punishment in the past but now things are changing today and switched on businesses understand that training their staff and workforce is an absolute vital function, there are of course good reasons for this.
First of all it is expected that today’s employees don’t want to work where they are not offered development and whether for personal or professional reasons people don’t want to be in a business where they are not kept kept up-to-date fully trained and given the opportunity to develop themselves into their full potential.
Secondly the speed of change in all of our industries workplaces, that includes technology, products and manufacturing, new skills are required constantly. Driver CPC training is a legal requirement to be constantly refreshed. The highway code changes. UK laws that affect driving change. Just because you did Tacho Training five years ago does not mean you know the current rules. Counterbalance and Reach Forklift licences need refreshing every three years because things change, technology changes and best practice develops and improves.
Training enables people to keep up-to-date with the market, it enables them to stay competitive, it enables them to keep step with their own organisation’s plans for the future and be a valuable cog in a well oiled machine.
Thirdly businesses now understand, more than ever, that their workforce is their most valuable asset and making the most of their workforce is what training is all about. That is also what Key Performance Training is all about as a company; training skills that are essential in the modern business organisation. We are committed to developing quality training and thereby enhancing the talent available in a workforce in order to meet ever increasing skills gap in the modern workplace. Often before Peak (September – December for many UK Companies) creating a more flexible workforce by training extra people in key skills like Forklift Driving can significantly improve OTIF (On Time In Full) scores. At the least refresher for Forklift Drivers and CPC Sessions for HGV Drivers can ensure that your current team are up to date and legally allowed to operate.
Study after study has shown that there is a direct link between training a workforce and organisational performance, a report from the National Economic Office showed that high-performance companies spent nearly 10 days training each individual every year compared to just two training days for what turned out to be low performance companies, we at Key Performance Training want to turn around this trend and bring all companies up to speed with modern skills training.
Another study published by the Policy Studies Institute found that individual employees were worth an additional 6% in pay for each one month of training that they took part in.
A certain digital printer and photocopier organisation, Xerox, is a perfect example of these training truths they spend on each member of staff in their workforce least £1,600 every year and their multi billion pound turnover worldwide shows exactly why they do this. It is no accident that those companies that invest in training their workforce are those companies that are market leaders in whatever their industry happens to be.
A truly switched on company will track peoples performance in their workplace in all sorts of different ways, targets, standards, competence. Setting someone to target to reach and then simply measuring whether they reach it or not is of course one of the simplest ways to monitor performance we at Key Performance Training ensure that we have possession of all of the facts on every individual that we provide training for.
Having standards allows us to measure different peoples performances against preset levels for standards such as an average or high and low level and again Key Performance Training can help with setting the standards within your industry. Measuring competence becomes much easier and falls into place once the previous two have been met assessing an individual’s complete competence is made so much easier once they have undergone a full assessment.
We live in times of rapid change in both business and work are now driven by constantly changing dynamic external factors. In some instances global competition, in other instances technology, and even evolving markets, create a demand for quality goods and services that require changes in skills and attitudes. In the past training employees often only took place now and again. This cannot any longer be the case in an ever changing and evolving workplace only those that stay well ahead of the curve will ultimately survive, both as individuals and businesses. Key Performance Training has got your back and will supply you with the training to up-skill your workforce and keep you competitive in this ever-changing climate.
If you want to learn more about Forklift Driver Training and LGV Driver CPC Training – contact us here
