Want to make your work teams more nimble?

Protect your organization from essential knowledge loss?

Create happier, more engaged employees?

Have them regularly shadow one another. Job shadowing is a proven development tool that affords both employers and employees a wide range of benefits. If you don’t have a formal program in place already, here are three reasons you should:

Increase Agility

When employees cross-train, they gain new skills and expand their scope of knowledge. More versatile employees provide your organization with increased flexibility to:

• Handle big projects
• Shift gears to address changing demands
• Seamlessly cover unexpected absences
• Pursue new lines of business or test new service concepts

Facilitate Knowledge Transfer

When employees leave you, they take much more than their personal belongings – they take ideas, proprietary information and other critical knowledge about your products/services, processes and customers.

Shadowing combats the “brain drain” turnover creates, by proactively facilitating knowledge transfer. To maximize the long-term value shadowing creates, have employees document the information, processes and best practices they learn.

Grow and Engage Your Team

For new hires, shadowing is a great way to improve confidence. By seeing and experiencing situations and processes first-hand, they can quickly acquire new skills, “learn the ropes” and become productive and independent, faster.

And for existing employees, shadowing builds relationships. Strengthens inter-departmental ties. Helps you develop your internal talent, without investing in outside training. It also provides opportunities for employees to uncover new ways to grow within your organization long-term.

Want to give it a try?

Set your program up for success by starting early.

Incorporate shadowing and other cross-training opportunities into your onboarding process. New hires will feel more welcome and experience a quicker ramp-up.

Formalizing Your Efforts

• Create a company-wide roadmap for shadowing, including lateral, vertical and inter-departmental shadowing opportunities.
• Set targets for annual, semi-annual or quarterly shadowing opportunities, depending on the needs of individual positions.
• Require managers to incorporate shadowing into employees’ individual growth plans.

When Job Shadowing isn’t Enough.

After implementing a shadowing program, some businesses find a lack of internal talent with adequate growth potential. That’s where Exact Staff can help.  We can recruit, screen and identify individuals with the skills, competencies and behavior traits to thrive long-term in your organization.  Contact your local Exact Staff office to learn more.