Firms Shift Underused Workers; Employees Gain Skills, Training as Companies Assign New Tasks

Until last year, Lay Luangrath's job was to answer phones & field customer queries at Hero Arts, a Richmond, CA. maker of decorative rubber stamps. Then in April 2008, Mr. Luangrath volunteered to maintain the firm's computer systems, too, to help Hero Arts save money. When a server computer malfunctioned a few months later, the 30-year-old Mr. Luangrath opted to fix it himself rather than call the company's usual consultants.
"I could have failed & blown everything up. But it worked, & I was pretty proud of myself," says Luangrath, who sought repair advice on Google. His experience highlights a little-noticed consolation of downturns: employees gain skills as they are forced to be more versatile. Some, like him, volunteer for new roles. Others are assigned new tasks.
Downturns also offer a psychological prod, as employees try to make themselves more valuable to bosses, says Fred Foulkes, a professor at the Boston University School of Management who heads a study group for HR execs. The versatility is most pronounced at small firms, where employees often fill multiple roles. But large companies may also ask employees to tackle new tasks, he says.
In a March poll by SHRM, 34% of 467 HR execs said their employers retrained employees for new positions in the past 6 months. That was up sharply from 10% who reported doing so in a similar survey in Oct.
When a Jan. hiring freeze sidelined most of Southwest Airlines's recruiters, the company, which prides itself on its no-layoff policy, assigned the workers to other depts. So far, 82 recruiters worked everywhere from flight operations to general counsel's office, saving Southwest $250,000, says Greg Muccio, who oversees the program. Many companies are shifting underused employees into sales, to help boost revenue, says Jeff Wittenberg, a partner at recruiter Kaye/Bassman International, Plano, TX.
The shift to new responsibilities can be disconcerting. Cathy Bissett, operations Mgr. at Xantrion Inc., an Oakland, CA, firm that runs computer systems for small companies, says she was apprehensive when President Anne Bisagno asked her and a colleague to help out with sales earlier this year. Both managers are engineers with no experience in sales, & had to juggle the new tasks on top of old ones. She says she trained the engineers in sales basics & gave them a flow chart of the sales process. She also briefed engineers on potential customers & objectives before sending them to networking events. Bissett says the networking mixers are still hard, but that selling is getting easier. In Feb., she closed 6 deals. Ms. Bisagno says the added sales efforts brought in enough new business to counteract a 10% drop in old contracts in the 1st-Q of the year. 2nd-Q revenue is likely to rise 3% from the 1st-Q, Ms. Bisagno says.
He said he took on the extra work after Hero Arts CEO Aaron Leventhal warned of slowing business & potential layoffs in early 2008. At the time, he says his technical knowledge was limited to preparing a disk drive to run apps. Since then, he's tapped Internet tech forums to fix malfunctioning printers & replace Hero Arts' antiquated tape drives with hard drives to back up data. He was initially hesitant to entrust the critical work to someone with little training; he agreed because of Luangrath's dependable track record. He later paid for him to take a 1-day class on computer troubleshooting. Not all his efforts have been successful. He had to call in the IT consultants in Nov., when Internet access stopped working after an office move. He estimates Luangrath is saving the 100-person firm as much as $1,200 a week in tech-support fees.