The 1 thing you can't skip when you train your new-hire...

Today, my team was chatting about the importance of clearly defining a person’s role, responsibilities and success measures BEFORE they get hired, when our own “newest hire” said something to me that literally made my whole day. She said:

It was your position agreement (our document for defining a position) that gave me total confidence that I could be successful in this job.

She reminded me that we show our love to our employees when we take the time to thoughtfully and explicitly communicate how we need them to help and what success looks like.

Yes, it takes time to do this work, but if you want top talent on your team, it’s a step you can’t afford to miss.

The 80/20 of Process Documentation

CEO: I need to document my business.

Me: Cool! What does that mean to you?

CEO: It means we’ll complete a project to write down everything we do and how we do It.

Me: That sounds awful.

Ok, maybe the conversation doesn’t go exactly like this, but I get a lot of business leaders coming my way with this big project of “documenting their business” in their sights.

And while it sounds amazing to finally have every single thing your business does out of your collective heads and into a tool like Trainual, creating a plan to document EVERYTHING is rarely the best approach. (Nor is it something most teams have the time nor attention span to complete, in my experience.)

Instead of thinking about it as getting everything documented, what if instead you focused on…

• which role(s) on your team need more consistent new-hire training so it doesn’t take up so much time and effort in their first weeks on the job.

• which tasks you’d like to delegate off your key team members’ plate so they can spend their valuable time on the right kinds of tasks.

• which processes live in the heads of just one person that could put your business at significant risk.

Which of these problems, if addressed, would give you the biggest return on your investment in the next 90 days? That’s where you begin.

Just start with one business result like, “We have an online new-hire training for medical assistants and have reduced training time by 50%.” Then document THAT THING.

Sure, if you keep doing this, you’ll eventually you’ll have your business out of your brain, but along the way, you’ll have implemented a whole lot of business-changing projects that actually impact the bottom line.

Focus on a business outcome you want to achieve through documentation.

Pick a small project and set deadlines and ownership.

Make the thing.

Implement.

That’s the secret recipe for documenting your business.

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If you need help defining and executing your 90-day documentation, WE CAN HELP! Check out our 90-Day Employee Training Sprint!

The Secret Reason I do This Work

It’s true that I love helping and teaching. And business leaders are an especially fun group to work with. It’s thrilling to see them master the critical systems in their business and be able to scale and grow.

But the truth is, there’s another reason I do this work that means a whole lot more to me.

My mission is to help people find their “dream jobs.” Ones where they feel safe, valued, challenged, and fulfilled by their work. 

And that mission might seem kind of odd, given all of my posts about process and training and documentation and such.

But as it turns out, a fantastic way to create “dream jobs” is to help humble, caring leaders who’ve already created nourishing cultures to clean up and document their processes and training so they can scale.

Because scaling an already-great culture means more great jobs created.

You bring the culture. We’ll bring the systems and training to scale it.

Let’s go.

Expecting "Above and Beyond" is Uncool

I understand that when leaders say they’re looking for employees to go “above and beyond” they mean well. But there’s a problem with this attitude.

Because if you’d have clearly defined the tasks and outcomes the person is responsible for, you wouldn’t need them to go above and beyond that. But most managers skip all that. They just look for a “rockstar” and trust that they’ll figure out how to stay on top of everything.

This is unfair.

And lazy.

What if instead of asking our employees to go “above and beyond,” we spent the hour-or-so it takes to write down…

The required attitudes & talents you need them to display.

The specific problems you need them to solve.

The specific tasks you need them to complete.

The measurable success metrics for their key areas of responsibility.

Because once you’ve done that, you don’t need your employees to go “above and beyond.” They just need to hit the mark.

Your A-Players HATE Office Drama

Here’s a thing I know about managing A-Players…

They crave ownership.

To be given a tricky, messy situation and to innovate and make it better.

To be responsible for the successes AND the failures of the systems they build and maintain.

To try new things that might not work.

And also?

It really bums them out when they have to constantly tiptoe around and explain themselves to people who are afraid of the kind of change they bring.

As a manager, anything you can do to remove obstacles (including human ones) from an A-Player’s path is a show of love. It’s another reason for them to stay and keep making your business more awesome.

Be the kind of manager who prioritizes the needs and contributions of your A-Players above the comfort of your B and C-Players.

Our Trainings are WORKING!

Our team cares a LOT about excellence. And about building and implementing training that actually gets business results for our clients. We literally talk about this topic EVERY SINGLE WEEK.

And that’s why getting data from our clients like the ones we got last week fill me with absolute joy.

You guys. THIS SHIT IS WORKING.

So let me tell you a little bit about my client, Megan and the amazing transformation she had.

About the Client

Megan runs this ridiculously wonderful business called, Scribble 2 Script, where she services a unique niche: Kids who don’t-qualify for special education services but who are undeniably “struggling” in some way. The therapies and instruction she provides are life-changing for the families she serves because they’ve often been told again and again that “there’s nothing wrong.” Seriously… parents RAVE about the transformations that Scribble 2 Script has helped their child achieve. (And no… it’s not just about handwriting)

Anyway - with the huge impact they make and the kind-hearted humans who work there, they’re a pretty wonderful client to serve.

The Problem

When I met Megan, she was ready to grow her business significantly, which meant growing her team. The problem was her specialist onboarding and training process involved hours and hours of her valuable time, plus the pain of having to re-figure-out the whole process every time a new person came on board. Their training was technical and very specific and bogged the whole team down every time they had to do it.

Something had to change.

This meant she needed to transform her 1-on-1 intensive onboarding and training program for specialists into a scalable, repeatable process. Enter, The Process Mavens.

The Transformation

After learning everything we needed to know about how her business worked, we helped her create an automated onboarding process that solicited all of the key onboarding information from new employees, ensuring she never had to hand out that darned employee handbook again!

Then, we got to work designing and building custom online training in Trainual for her three most essential programs, including creating checkpoints for all of her hands-on observation and practice sessions. We even built her a tool her trainers can use to assess the trainee on the job to make sure they’re really ready to run solo!

The Results

Now here’s the exciting part - After 3+ months of using her new-and-improved onboarding and training, she reported the following before/after metrics…

• Number of hours it takes to train a new specialist went from 80 total hours to 30 hours!

• Number of days it takes for a new specialist to be productive on the job went from 20 days to 10 days!

• When asked to respond to the statement “It’s easy to prep and onboard new employees” she went from “Strongly Disagree” to “Agree”!

• When asked to respond to the statement, “Our training provides a consistent message about our values and culture” she went from “Disagree” to “Strongly Agree”!

• When asked to respond to the statement, “Our training provides consistent job-specific training”, she went from “Disagree” to “Strongly Agree”!

• Ditto for her training’s effectiveness, efficiency, and experience.

In short, their training process was completely transformed.

And now, as her business is on the cusp of huge growth, she’s ready to onboard and train her specialists with ease. More importantly, she can rest well at night knowing every one of them knows how to do their job the right way - an essential thing when you’re working with little kids.

So yeah… I’m pretty proud of what we’re doing over here at The Process Mavens. Yes, we’re helping our clients scale, but when I think about the ripple effect to our clients’ clients… it’s pretty wonderful.

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Do you need help building a new-hire onboarding and training that will scale? Complete the form below to schedule a call!

Today, I Avoided My Hard Things

You know that thing where you avoid doing the things you’re not confident about and instead stay in that comfy familiar zone of the things you’re awesome at?

Well that’s me today.

Instead of reaching out, blogging, doing outreach on LinkedIn, working on growing my audience (all of which feel hard at the moment), I’ve spent my day helping clients fix operational workflows, writing processes, and going above and beyond to provide extra coaching to help a client frame their KPIs and quarterly goals.

One person’s hard thing is another’s person’s easy thing.

And I keep reminding myself that the things that are easy for me in my business today used to feel impossible. But I worked at them and kept practicing and eventually they got easy.

Marketing, for me, is no different. I know I need to keep showing up. Keep trying new things. Keep practicing.

It’s the same for you and your hard thing. Let’s keep trying together.

Have you stalled out on your training development?

Developing training is one of those things that seems like it should be easy.

After all, you know how to do the things you want to train your new employees to do. Why should it be hard?

And so it can be discouraging to start working on a training project, only to find that you keep getting stuck.

Training development is deep work. It’s almost certainly not something you can “crank out” in a few hours. Rather, it’s something that takes clear intention, thoughtful design, the ability to sustain focus to write or record all of the content, and a sharp eye to ensure everything is cohesive and consistent and actually leads to real learning.

So don’t be so hard on yourself if you keep getting stuck.

You’re an expert at what you do. You don’t need to be an expert at designing a training for how to do it.

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We can help you get your new-hire training completed once-and-for all! Set up a call with us to see if we can help.

Don't Cross-Train Your Employees Without Doing This...

Here are 2 things that are true, but are seemingly contradictory:

1. You must cross-train your employees. Perhaps everyone on your team should know how to close customer support tickets and can be called in to support the customer service team, when needed.

2. You must assign ONLY one role (which might be more than one person) to own every task in your business. Because if everyone on the team is accountable for closing customer tickets, you’re at risk of it not being done reliably.

When you don’t give your team clarity on who owns which tasks, balls get dropped, toes get stepped on, and processes don’t get innovated.

Cross-training is to provide backup, not to forever distribute the workload.

This Trick Will Make Your Processes & Company Info CLEARER

I’m in the middle of training a new employee and I realized it’s been a long time since I really broke down the different ways we provide value for our clients. I’m a visual learner, so I was drawing things as I explained and this simple-but-beautiful little illustration of 4 categories of products we create emerged from my ramblings:

Through this process, I got the joy of experiencing, first-hand, one of the principles I talk about all the time when we work with clients to build their training and documentation:

You get clearer on how things work when you explain them to someone else.
If it’s been awhile since you thoroughly explained your core offerings and how they serve each of your different client needs, I highly recommend it. You may just walk away with a deeper level of understanding that can make you even better at spreading the word about just how awesome your business is!

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