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I wrote in the December 2006 issue of Wood Digest about taking advantage of the approaching downturn to invest in your people to better prepare them for the inevitable recovery that will come. I believe this is a subject well worth revisiting in more depth.

I can offer a plethora of noble humanitarian reasons why you should invest in your people, but at the end of the day, the one basic and irrefutable reason is that it makes good business sense: It pays.

We are part of an industry that values experience, often to an unjustified level. In fact, at times I think we use our tenacity of clinging to the value of experience as an excuse for not being more open to the value of education. Possibly Heinrich Heine put it best when he said: “Experience is a good school, but the fees are high.”

I once worked with a gentleman who was older than I (something that happens less frequently all the time). Whenever I would suggest trying a different method or approach, I would be confronted with the: “I have 30 years of experience doing this, and this is the best [or only] way.” One day I said to him, “What you have is not 30 years of experience, but six months of experience repeated 60 times.”

Of all the benefits of education, possibly the greatest is that it opens minds to new views, new approaches and new opportunities, a trait that simply being on the job does not guarantee. Unless we open the minds of those around us, we — and they — will never realize the potential value of what they can become.

I understand the difficulty of committing to training, especially in a down business cycle, but there is never a time that does not offer excuses, and the longer it is put off the longer it is until you can begin to reap the returns.

I was recently in a meeting discussing a reduction in workforce. The plant manager was explaining the drop in productivity was due to reassigning people to jobs they were not proficient at. I introduced the need to begin cross-training to avoid this reoccurring, but as I spoke I could see the silent argument in his eyes; he didn’t have time to do cross-training. However, he is now finding the time to suffer low productivity, and its resultant cost penalties in a period when they can least be absorbed. Had he been actively managing a cross-training program previously, he would not be suffering the magnitude of loss in productivity he currently is experiencing. In reality, he has now defaulted to a very expensive and painful cross-training program.