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This paper aims to explore advantages, disadvantages, advice and concerns regarding workforce cross training practices, as well as examples of businesses and organizations that have successfully implemented cross training programs.

This article is a general review, based on the literature available and the knowledge and expertise of the authors.

There are a number of realities, such as increased training cost, questionable improvement in productivity, complexity of workflow, and employee resistance, that an employer must consider carefully before moving towards a cross training approach. At the same time, cross training can provide employees with learning and growth opportunities that can help them be ready for emergencies, recessions, and the competition of a global economy.

This article adds to the literature on workforce cross training and will be of interest to those involved in that field.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the tradeoffs between efficiency and flexibility in production processes involve a cross-trained workforce. The study quantifies production losses that stem from worker learning and forgetting in a cross-training environment.

The paper examines multiple levels of cross-training in the context of several workplace factors including absenteeism, turnover, process change frequency, and process change magnitude using discrete event simulation. The parameters of the simulation model are informed by data from a operating manufacturing system.

Results suggest that productivity gains obtained from a moderate level of cross-training (e.g. two tasks) can outweigh the production losses from additional training, and that adding further cross-training beyond this may negatively affect system performance.

Production systems exist in an environment of process change and competitive pressure. Cross-training is an often-used operational technology for managing process knowledge in an environment of change as well as providing employees with a richer work environment. While the potential benefits of enriching the workplace experience include greater motivation, less boredom and fatigue, greater task vigilance, and other effects generally regarded as beneficial, productivity losses brought about by training and retraining disruptions associated with cross-training have not been examined as widely.

The purpose of this study is use a bibliometric analysis to explore the relational nature of knowledge creation in WFM in operations. Companies live under constant pressure to find the best ways to plan their workforce, and the workforce emangement (WFM) is one of the biggest challenges faced by managers. Relevant research on WFM in operations has been published in a several range of journals that vary in their scope and readership, and thus the academic contribution to the topic remains largely fragmented.

To address this gap, this review aims to map research on WFM in operations to understand where it comes from and where it is going and, therefore, provides opportunities for future work. This study combined two bibliometric approaches with manual document coding to examine the literature corpus of WFM in operations to draw a holistic picture of its different aspects.

Content and thematic analysis of the seminal studies resulted in the extraction of three key research themes: workforce cross-training, planning workforce mixed methods and individual workforce characteristics. The findings of this study further highlight the gaps in the WFM in operations literature and raise some research questions that warrant further academic investigation in the future.

Likewise, this study has important implications for practitioners who are likely to benefit from a holistic understanding of the different aspects of WFM in operations.

Telephone response system is the frontline of hospital operations. The purpose of this paper is to analyze a representative telephone response system of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals, address the existing inefficiency issues such as long call waiting time, and improve system resilience to changes.

Resource sharing schemes are proposed to improve the system performance in answering calls related to appointment booking and medication renewal. Discrete event simulation is adopted to model the current system and the resource sharing schemes.

The resource sharing schemes dramatically improve system performance reflected by the decrease of call waiting time and queue, as well as the extreme high utilization of agents in a key unit. Compared with the less desired alternative of hiring additional employees to mitigate the performance issues, the resource sharing schemes perform at par or even better. Sharing more resource during the peak hours can further balance the agent workload.

The resource sharing schemes could alleviate staffing shortage, long waiting time, and high-abandonment rate in the bottle-beck unit of the system, and lead to better utilization of scarce resources on the hospital floor. The concept reflects localized centralization efforts in traditionally highly decentralized telephone operations in hospital systems.

This research provides a structured approach to analyze the operations of a VA telephone response system. The developed simulation model is validated, and this provides a valuable tool for management to analyze the complicated telephone operations of the telephone systems of other VA and non-VA hospitals. Resource sharing constitutes a cost-effective solution for improving system performance and resilience.

Cross‐utilization of the labour force is widely recognized as a method for improving productivity in service organizations. This paper investigates the effect of cross‐utilization on workforce staff size, at the aggregate level, for a two‐skilled labour force. Workers are assumed to have 100 per cent productivity in their primary skill, and cross‐training policies ranging from zero to 100 per cent productivity in the secondary skill were investigated across a variety of labour demand conditions. The results suggest that small degrees of cross‐utilization can provide significant workforce savings and that there tend to be diminishing returns beyond 50 per cent productivity in the secondary skill.

Corporations want productivity and efficiency, while the work force is asking for more time with the family. The ability of management to juggle productivity requirements with employee demands can be difficult and requires creative solutions. The Analytical Central Call Management (CCM) group at Hewlett Packard recently piloted a compressed work week schedule, consisting of four ten‐hour work days (4 x 10). However this pilot schedule encountered many problems. After careful evaluation the key to successful implementation of this plan is cross‐training. Cross‐training will help solve some of the morale issues caused by this pilot schedule. Issues of unproductive time and lack of staff caused by absences would also be alleviated. If employers want to develop management tools more appropriate to the need of this decade’s work force and the competitive challenges of a global economy, they will have to learn to use work time and space in more appropriate ways.

The effects of cellular manufacturing (CM) on increased delivery speed and resource utilization along with its interaction with volume, mix, routing, and labor flexibilities are not clear for manufacturers and supply chain managers. Aims to focus on this.

Based on real data from a US screen‐printing company, a simulation model is designed to determine the influence of volume, mix, routing and labor flexibilities in presence of volatile demand. Simulation of one and two cell configuration is compared with job shop to determine the shortest delivery and highest utilization.

As volume flexibility increases, delivery is faster in presence of CM compared to job shop. Furthermore, added routing flexibility results in 70 percent shorter lead time with low volume flexibility, and 85 percent shorter lead time with high volume flexibility. Additionally, in the two‐cell design, assignment of fewer, but more multi‐skilled workers shared between cells results in higher utilization and lower lead time.

This study contributes to the manufacturing research by revealing the benefits of CM, and the importance of volume, routing, and labor flexibilities reacting quickly to volatile demand in today's dispersed manufacturing environment. Also, this study demonstrates that labor allocation is equally important in manufacturing cells as the equipment and part decisions are.

The findings provide manufacturers a guideline on how to best set up CM and operational flexibilities to respond faster to volatile demand. The simulation model is successful in showing that cells and manufacturing flexibilities are strong enablers of faster delivery lead time and higher resource utilization.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how team management affects team‐learning activities.

The authors empirically study 68 teams as they operate in the natural business context of a major Spanish bank. Quantitative research utilizing multiple regression analyses is used to test hypotheses.

The leadership behaviour (consideration, initiation of structure) displayed by the team leader plays a key role in facilitating team learning. Team leader behaviour characterised by consideration and in particular by initiation of structure are both positively related to team‐learning activities. Cross‐training of team members also contributes to team‐learning behaviour.

A specific setting may limit the generalizability of findings. Further research may accordingly investigate to what extent these results can be generalized to other settings or other aspects of team learning.

The leadership style adopted by the team leader, as well as cross‐training of members, affect team‐learning activities. These results link leadership theory to collective learning in teams and organizations, and suggest ways leaders can contribute to improved learning.

The study provides new insight into how management of teams facilitates team‐learning activities. While consideration is somewhat related to team learning, initiation of structure as well as cross‐training appear as key variables.

This study explores the concept of “talent agility” since its inception using bibliometric analysis and paves the way for future research agenda in the field of business and management.

The articles were retrieved from the Scopus database comprising 67 publications from 2001 to September 2020. This study has applied bibliometric techniques such as citation analysis, co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, co-authorship analysis, and co-occurrence keyword analysis.

The bibliometric analysis reveals the publication trends, most influential authors, articles, journals, countries, and important keywords. Subsequently, it presents the network connections among them in the field of talent agility. It identified emerging research diversifications in the literature on talent agility.

The limitation of this study is the extraction of research articles from a single database, i.e. Scopus. This study provides insights to the researchers and practitioners on comprehensive understandings of the emerging concept “talent agility”, an overview of the publication trends, emerging research themes identified in the clusters, and suggests possible directions for further study.

This study provides the intellectual structure of talent agility literature and its advancement over the periods.

Supervisors in the 1990s will be challenged by a dynamic, shifting and shrinking workforce. The traditional white, male‐dominated workforce will become obsolete, with a more diverse workforce made up of females, minorities, the disabled and the elderly taking its place. Supervisor training is the answer to effectively managing these changes. Across the USA, many companies have implemented workplace diversity through extensive supervisor training programmes. These programmes address the importance of understanding each employee and how individual needs differ. With the real threat of a shrinking workforce ahead, employee retention becomes an additional focus. Traditional management styles are not as successful, with the new workforce as the “leader” or “coaching” styles of management. Companies which do not effectively train their supervisors to handle the needs of a variety of people and do not shift their management styles to accommodate the new workforce may struggle to stay afloat.