Since the great recession, most companies are leaner and are finding ways to work with less staff. Prior to the recession, most companies staffed at average demand requirements. Generally that means that during peak demand staff may have to work 15% to 25% longer (overtime) to meet on-time delivery. After the recession, with companies now staffing at below average demand, staff may have to increase their workload 30% to 40% during peak production.
This can create problems in two ways. First of all, overtime is inefficient when utilized too much. In addition, this can jeopardize on-time delivery and hurt staff morale.
How can you maintain lean production without shipping late, increasing costs, and hurting morale?
Leading companies are investing more in cross-training and on-call staffing strategies. On-call staffing is something we’ve seen companies do for years. But generally it has been relegated to manual production tasks such as finishing and mailing operations.
The easiest and most expensive solution is using a temp agency. A less expensive but more challenging management issue is to bring in people who may work in other companies, have retired, or are simply looking for part-time work. While many companies make it look easy, mastering the on-call staffing strategy in production is harder than it looks. It requires painstaking attention to detail and mastering many different human resource issues.
Of these two strategies, cross-training is more popular than on-call staffing. Some companies just don’t like the idea of using on-call staff. Tactically creating a cross-training program is simple to do.
However, for companies that don’t use cross-training every day, the implementation can run into cultural issues. Therefore, starting down the path of cross-training requires the buy-in from upper management, meetings with staff, and a demonstrated proof of the importance of cross-training.
The greatest stumbling block is whenever someone says, “We don’t have time to do that today.” Once that happens, all training ends. The key to cross-training is to schedule it like you schedule work, and just like scheduled work, never fail to deliver on time.
The companies that use this most effectively:
- constantly recruit and maintain a good source of on-call staff;
- create, formalize, and provide in-depth training strategies;
- rotate the on-call staff to keep them up to date;
- measure, monitor, and benchmark performance; and
- replace low performers with higher performers.