In the industrial sector, managers are pressured to deliver results despite reduced budgets, smaller teams, and a shortage of new talent. If you are struggling to overcome these challenges, cross-functional training may hold a potential solution.
Cross-functional training (or, in this context, multi-craft training) enables you to gain greater value from your existing workforce by providing the skills and knowledge that go beyond what’s already used in their current role. This means that your technicians and operators are better equipped to solve problems on the fly, spot trouble early, and prevent costly downtime.
Many facility managers and training leaders haven’t yet considered this approach, but it is a practical option with a lot of benefits for both the organization and workers. Here’s what you need to know about multi-craft training, why it’s valuable, and how to implement it.
The Benefits of Multi-Craft Skills Training
Benefits to the Organization
In factories, plants, and manufacturing facilities, small issues like faulty motors and broken pumps often cause the biggest disruptions. Most of these fixes are not difficult to perform and may involve only a few additional steps beyond what your technicians or operators are already doing. If your workers have not received the right training, however, these simple issues can create serious problems that limit or halt production.
For instance, many control room operators aren’t trained in mechanical or electrical maintenance. This means that when equipment stops working, the operator must often call in a contractor to address the issue. Not only is this expensive, but it may take hours or even days to bring the machinery back online, resulting in more lost revenue due to downtime.
Providing a control room operator with some basic mechanical or instrumentation and control (I&C) training will enable them to better understand the information they’re receiving on their screens and diagnose basic issues. Cross-training an outside operator will enable them to perform simple maintenance tasks such as calibrating pressure transducers or rewiring transmitters without overburdening electrical or mechanical technicians.
Multi-craft training for a specialist technician can also help convert many two-person issues (for example, something minor that might ordinarily require an electrical tech and a mechanical tech) into a one-person task. This training will allow your workers to identify potential trouble spots and perform preventative maintenance that keeps these issues from affecting production in the future.
Moreover, additional training is a valuable tool for improving worker retention. Approximately 76% of employees “say they are more likely to stay with a company that offers continuous training” (Society for Human Resource Management, 2022).
Benefits to the Worker
Multi-craft training doesn’t just improve organizations; it also offers wide-ranging benefits for workers. When workers gain skills beyond those strictly related to their original role, they are more likely to feel empowered, confident, and clear in their responsibilities and capabilities. This not only improves employee engagement but provides them with a sense of job security and employability. An operator who is also trained to handle some electrical, mechanical, or I&C tasks has the potential to develop toward a variety of positions, giving them flexibility as they navigate their career.
How to Implement Multi-Craft Skills Training
Overcoming Budget and Staffing Challenges
Admittedly, budgets are tight, and taking workers away from their workstations involves logistical challenges and overtime costs. Still, implementing multi-craft training may be more feasible than you think.
For example, a good learning and development (L&D) company with expertise in technical training can conduct learning programs at your facility, which eliminates the cost of sending your people offsite. Basic instrumentation and electrical (I&E) training can be completed in as little as a single 40-hour work week. Best of all, by working onsite, your people can gain valuable hands-on experience working with your actual equipment and machinery.
Alternatively, you can blend your on-site program with technical eLearning—mixing hands-on skill-building and online conceptual training for strong, sustained knowledge retention. This option gives you even more flexibility when it comes to logistics since workers don’t need to perform online training in groups. eLearning allows individuals to access training content whenever their schedule allows and in shorter chunks of time.
Cross-training your employees is an investment that will pay off by lowering maintenance and repair costs. You will also avoid the external costs and downtime associated with contractors when you can resolve more issues in-house.
Supporting Change at the Grassroots Level
When shifting to a multi-craft approach, you can borrow a concept from GP’s Organizational Change Management practice. This individual change model, nicknamed R2P2, helps workers understand why they’re being asked to make changes and become advocates for the new ways of working. To succeed, each worker needs you to account for these four elements:
- Reason: Communicate early and often so your operators and technicians have clarity around what is changing and why, the risks of not changing, and how these changes will benefit them.
- Role: Be sure they understand the actions and activities required of them to make the change successful.
- Path: Empower each individual worker with the knowledge, skills, and plan to be successful in the change with no obstacles to adoption.
- Partner: Facilitate access to networks of people who can provide listening, coaching, practice, reinforcements, and individual accountability.
These grassroots change management steps can help break down any resistance your workers may be holding on to. Your efforts here will go a long way toward convincing them that cross-functional training is worth their time and that multi-craft skills will benefit their careers, not just the organization.
Producing Essential Technical Documentation
You cannot always deliver formal training at the best possible time. You will likely teach your workers these new skills weeks or even months before they’ll have the opportunity to use them. Create quality technical documentation to sustain high performance over time. Procedure guides, technical drawings, equipment manuals, control diagrams, and other job aids will help support your multi-craft training program by ensuring workers can access key information in the moment of need. To start, these documents can be as simple as basic maintenance and troubleshooting procedures that walk employees through the steps needed to perform basic repairs.
Improve Performance and Productivity
The multi-craft maintenance approach may be the industrial sector’s best-kept secret for lowering maintenance costs, reducing downtime, and streamlining operations. If you manage a factory, plant, or manufacturing facility, you owe it to yourself to evaluate what this approach can do for your organization and your people.
Not sure where to start? No problem. Our craft skills experts can help you design or implement a mechanical, electrical, or I&C maintenance training program to drive efficiencies across your entire operation.
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