Welcome to We Make Systems Sexy! We talked earlier in the month about learning how to delegate. (if you missed that conversation, you can read the blog here) If you don’t know how to delegate or you don’t feel like you’re good at delegating take a look at our delegation exercise to be a pro in no time. (get the delegation exercise here) Today we’re going to jump a little bit more into that subject: Delegation.
Once you’ve figured out what you can delegate, we want to then talk about how you can add a new team member with ease. Now you’ve identified what you need and you’ve identified what things you can give to a new team member, so then once you go through that hiring process, you want it to be a smooth process.
You don’t want it to be rocky for this new hire because that makes you stressed, makes them stressed and that only serves to start off a relationship in a very tense way. If you have narrowed all of that first part down, you can then figure out what you actually are able to give to somebody, and you found the person that you think is right for that role.
Now that you’ve hired a new team member, you will truly see the importance of having SOPs.
Before you actually bring on that new hire or start bringing on team members, I highly recommend that you identify what you want your team member onboarding process to look like and have that process documented, so that now and into the future you can continue to improve.
You have this beautiful process of what it looks like to join your team from a team member’s perspective. So document how you want this to go.
Do you want team members to get a welcome gift? Do you want them to go through certain training videos? Do you want them to be in certain meetings with you and the team at first to see how the flow goes? Do you want to add them to certain software right off the bat? What do you want them to do? What do you want them to have access to?
You have to be thinking about those kinds of things. Definitely start with what you want your team member onboarding to look like. From there, be thinking about what tasks you identified in the delegation exercise that you first want them to take on.
Do you already have those documented? If not, there are a couple of ideas that can help you to start documenting without it feeling so stressful.
The first thing is, a lot of times you have kickoff calls or some beginning training calls with these team members, and I highly recommend doing a screen share and recording these calls. Even if you break them up into separate recordings so it’s not like a long two-hour training, then you can have it down to where it can later be turned into actual documented SOPs.
But the person also has an opportunity to be on the call with you, see your screen share, ask questions and then be able to go back and say, “Yes, I remember how they did this because I was right there.”
That may not always be possible. Maybe your assistant is someone on the other side of the world or they just work different hours than you, or you’re just not available always at the same time. You can still record the process that you’re doing while you’re actually doing it.
This does not mean that you’re going to be wasting time having to go and record processes… do it while you’re already doing it. If you are delivering specific client services for whatever client, record the process of what you’re doing, label it and stick it in a folder dedicated to training and SOPs.
Then when it comes time to delegate, you can show the new team member how they can do that because you’ve already done it and recorded it. It may not be perfect, but you are getting a start and getting it organized. Those are some beautiful, simple ways to get started on documenting these processes and get started on the process of SOP creation.
Be thinking about that for everything, even for small things within your business for the new team member to learn and understand the processes, client delivery, client onboarding, client offboarding, gathering testimonials, and repurposing content – really all of the things that you’re doing in your business.
Most everything can be delegated with the proper training.
If those new team members come on and they need a lot of training, that’s fine, but record the calls and use them for the future because the likelihood is that the more that you bring on new team members or shift responsibilities, you really need to nail down that documentation. So take the time now to do some of that training and recording, etcetera, because it’s going be so much faster and so much easier for those new hires that you bring on in the future.
Once you have actually started building out those SOPs you want them stored in the same place. You don’t want one version over here that was written by so and so and it follows its own style and then one version over here that’s totally different. You want to have everything in one central location. We house our SOPs in Google Drive and then we actually link them into ClickUp. We use relationships to tie them into the task that they apply to.
A lot of people will actually build out their SOPs within ClickUp because it’s one central location for everything. At We Make Systems Sexy, we don’t particularly do it that way. Whatever way you do it, once you start documenting, make sure that everyone’s following the same process.
There should be a template for clear documentation for how you want to document things, and then keep track of those documents, and those SOPs in an SOP manual. Just use a simple spreadsheet and organize it by what department handles this and who wrote this and when was it updated, when it needs to be updated.
The ultimate goal is that you are not going to have to keep repeating this. That’s the key here. We don’t want to keep repeating this a hundred times down the road because we didn’t take the time to document it from the beginning.
We use a combo of written (which is our primary), and loom videos for explanations, but don’t rely so heavily on the videos because those are harder to update and they take more time actually review.
ClickUp and an SOP Manual build-out can actually help so much with team hiring and making sure that you have success in your team.
So if you’re like, “Yes, all of this sounds great, but I don’t have the time to dedicate to a project management tool or building out an SOP Manual”, that is where we come in. That is our specialty. We have a VIP Day for each of the those build-outs designed to save you time and make you money.
We have an SOP Manual in a day and you can click here to learn more about that.
We also have ClickUp set up in a day. If you have questions about how ClickUp can help your business get streamlined, schedule a free chat with us today.
If you do an SOP Manual in a day with our team, we will actually link those SOPs to your ClickUp so that it becomes functional and you can actually keep those SOPs updated with ease and auto-reminders to continue to build on ’em.
