CHICAGO — Every drycleaning operator knows the feeling. A key employee calls in sick, takes a long-overdue vacation or leaves without warning, and suddenly a critical station grinds to a halt. The work piles up. Customers notice.

One solution to making sure a challenge doesn’t become a crisis is cross-training. The answer, however, isn’t always apparent until owners see for themselves that their operation has a single point of vulnerability.

“It was definitely a gradual realization,” says Steve Rettler, president and owner of All Seasons Garment Care & Tailoring in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which employs close to 90 people. “You start to realize that when key people are gone, there are assets you have to move around and how disruptive that can be for the company and its daily operations.”

How cross-training programs are structured varies widely. For Rettler, it is informal but deeply embedded in his company’s culture.

“We don’t have big systems behind this,” he says. “We’re constantly taking the people who have the most experience and having them train the other people who we need to cross-train. We try to build it into the culture of the company. It’s important for them to understand multiple positions, and to understand that it will also affect their compensation by becoming more valuable to the company.”

Chris and Craig Bamberg, brothers who are partners and co-owners of Platinum Dry Cleaners in Naples, Florida, take a more structured approach.

“We select certain individuals who might be specialized in a particular type of finishing,” Chris says. “That person will be the team leader, and then we’ll grab somebody who we feel has the skill set to replicate that as closely as possible.”

The Bambergs try to do some training toward the end of the workday, but the bulk of it happens during their slow season or on weekends.

“When our volume drops when the snowbirds leave, that’s when we really initiate,” Chris says. “We hire a person this season. She’s good at shirts. We think that she can help on sheets. We will throw her over there for half a day to shadow and then kind of work her way in over a two-, three-, four-day period. And then, if it turns out she is not the right fit for that, we’ll deploy her somewhere else.”

Mike and Janet Garman, husband and wife owners of Glyndon Lord Baltimore Cleaners in Glyndon, Maryland, use a skills-mapping chart that gives them a visual snapshot of who’s capable of doing what.

“On one column, we’re listing all of our employees, and across the top there are different headers for everything from dry cleaning to shirt pressing to UGG cleaning to leather/suede/fur mark-in and so on,” Janet says. “We put little dots beside the things that each employee is trained in. It can show us where we have holes and where we need additional people to be trained.”

Deciding which employees to cross-train is part observation, part instinct. Several factors figure into this equation.

“You can tell what type of pride they’re taking in the product that they’re finishing,” Chris Bamberg says. “A lot of our employees are inquisitive. When you get a new piece of machinery installed where you have to bring in a technician, you see two or three workers stopping what they’re doing to walk over and look. There’s obviously an interest.”

Rettler weighs experience, the criticality of the role and the employee’s temperament.

“Somebody may not be able to act in that role if they’re not good at training or explaining,” he says. “Everybody, particularly in production, has cross-training abilities almost across the board.”

The Garmans fold cross-training potential into their hiring process.

“That’s part of the interview process,” Janet Garman says. “You’re trying to understand what their strengths are and where they could best benefit the organization.”

Come back Thursday for Part 2 of this series, where we’ll explore ways to train when time is tight while maintaining quality in the end results.