When a single maintenance expert holds all the institutional knowledge, a company’s operations—and safety—can be at risk. For employers, the stakes are high, as one unexpected absence or departure could delay critical maintenance, compromise equipment safety and create liability concerns.
Gil Truesdale, leader of safety services at MSC, shares the value of cross-training multiple employees to manage specialized maintenance tasks and offers practical steps to get started with this strategy.
How does cross-training maintenance workers improve workplace safety and efficiency?
Cross-training reduces single points of failure by having multiple people who can handle tasks, especially during emergencies.
By having multiple trained personnel, you’re enabling a much quicker response time, where more people have the knowledge and authority to jump in, quickly identify, diagnose and resolve in a safe manner whatever might be going on.
And by doing all of that, you are truly following the core values of safety. You have backups in place. You’ve gone through the gap analysis. You see where there could be problems, and you have a solution for those problems prior to them starting, which reduces error rates, workload and fatigue on any one person.
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As a result, you increase your safety rating, or EMR (experience modification rate). The higher your EMR goes, the safer you are. And the safer you are, the lower your insurance rates are in most cases from a liability standpoint. Everybody can win in that situation, from the executive board all the way to the people being protected.
What are the risks of not cross-training, or having a scenario where one person has all the institutional maintenance knowledge?
From my perspective, when one tenured person has all of a company’s institutional knowledge, the four biggest risks are:
Knowledge loss that you’ve got to be prepared for as the baby boomer generation moves out of the workforce.
Lack of backup, where there is no redundancy and only a few people know critical information.
Amplifying errors, where certain individuals become overloaded and take shortcuts, obviously increasing the chances of mistakes.
Delayed response, where the reliance on one person really slows everything down.
Planning for sharing institutional knowledge is a lot like planning for a hurricane: If this happens, then this is what we do. You have to have a contingency plan.
What impact does cross-training have on morale, engagement and retention?
Cross-training boosts morale, which is really tied to action more so than it is to words. Workers feel valued through the company’s investment in their growth.
When they learn new skills, it fosters a sense of purpose, collaboration and contribution to team success. There’s a shift from “that’s my job” to shared responsibility.
Workers feel more confident and capable. They have more job security. Cross-training becomes a career-development opportunity rather than “extra work.” They see the advantages of prepping for leadership roles rather than just company needs, and that increases engagement and retention.
Also, when organizations commit to cross-training maintenance teams, they start to gain a reputation as being employee-focused, which helps them to draw top talent.
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If an employer wanted to create a cross-training plan for their maintenance teams, where should they start?
No. 1, look at your safety-critical tasks—that’s lockout/tagout, high voltage, emergency shutdown. Energy-related situations drive recordables.
No. 2, identify the single points of failure. Is there a qualified person, and is there only one? If there’s only one, that’s a single point of failure. Yes, Bill is great—he knows everything about the electrical system. But Bill is on a cruise for two months. So, if we need something to be identified within the electrical system and Bill is the subject matter expert, who do we go to?
No. 3, focus on high-frequency or high-impact preventive maintenance, or PM. Are we complacent about it? I go in every Tuesday and reach into a confined space and replace the blue filter and turn off the light and plug it back in, and then I go back and have a cup of coffee. You get complacent with that stuff. Instead, take routine tasks and migrate those through multiple people—that’s the way you use cross-training.
Read more: Worker Safety: How to Battle Complacency in Your Workplace
No. 4, have on-call emergency response duties for tasks needed 24/7 or during off-shifts. If that machine goes down, the whole plant shuts down. So, if it’s the heart of the plant, we’d better have three or four backups. Who’s a competent person? Tom. Is Tom here? Yes. What if Tom is sick? Cindy. That’s contingency planning.
Are there any maintenance tasks you might consider not cross-training?
Look at your bottleneck tasks. It could be that nobody who’s qualified wants to take two and a half hours to go get an elevated work platform to change a filter in 30 seconds. These tasks get pushed to unqualified staff, and it leads to constant delays.
See if you could outsource those tasks to a maintenance provider. A maintenance contractor is going to do a much better job because they’re used to going into plants and doing these kinds of tasks. And you can save your subject matter personnel for higher-value duties.
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