Everyone knows I’m just a little bit of a fitness junkie, I love yoga, swimming, and when I’m not injured I will run miles …
Everyone knows I’m just a little bit of a fitness junkie, I love yoga, swimming, and when I’m not injured I will run miles and miles. I especially love to cross train when I get bored or hit a plateau in my performance. Since my startup is focused on helping fitness businesses, I’ve taken a page from my fitness junkie ways, and cross trained my startup team!
The reason for cross training my team is because on a small team one person being sick or out can impact the performance of the entire team, so there needs to be some redundancy in skill sets. While not everyone will perform as well as those who are the experts it helps to have an extra pair of hands to help. The other reason is that it actually helps to keep people motivated. Learning a new set of skills on the job leads to better rates of retention, but it also gives employees a birds-eye view of the business. I know a lot of founders would balk at the time that it takes to train people. While you cannot expect employees to be loyal, it does make a difference to think of each person on your staff as a long term investment, and you want to give them opportunities to succeed.
When it comes to cross training, your employees don’t have to have all the same skills. There are just few key areas that everyone on the teams needs to be able to handle. Think of it this way, what skills would an employee who needs to keep the company running for just for one day, barring any events out of the ordinary, need to have?
Customer Support
This is probably the #1 area that everyone needs to be trained especially if you’ve got customers, because they’ll send requests in almost daily, and expect some level of response. Having everyone on the team man support is good to because it will give them a chance to develop some empathy and understanding, plus a sense of gratification knowing that people actually use and care about the service!
While its usually myself or the buzz bee who man chat, there are times when one of us is out demoing or hosting an event, and one of the developers will have to step in. There are other startups like Olark, who put all their employees on a rotation, where one person has to man all support channels for one day.
Just figure out a consistent scheme that works for your company, and make sure everyone knows what it is!
Deployment
While developers will specialize in areas like DevOps, front-end, back-end, security, scalability, and so on, its still a good idea for everyone to know the basics of deploying an application.
Let Them Teach Each Other
While you might have put in a lot of time with your first employee, teaching them the ropes, communicating the vision, and explaining how all the systems are setup, as you start to grow you need to back off, and trust that your employees can teach one another. That’s how you breed a team that can think and operate for itself!
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