May 10, 2023

SWS #05: How a manual solves 4 BIG problems

Paddy Mann · 3 minute read

There are 4 big business problems that a team manual can help you to solve:

Business leaders that are too busy
The same mistakes keep happening
Employees not quickly or fully onboarded
Being reliant on key people

I'd love to hear which ones you can relate to!

Business leaders too busy

The first one is business leaders — and other senior staff — who are too busy.

When senior staff get too busy:

They become a bottleneck for other team members
They don’t get enough time on important strategic initiatives
And they struggle to disconnect from work in evenings and weekends

This is a problem that we can solve.

Using your team manual and the approach that we recommend for prioritizing and documenting tasks, it typically takes less than 10 hours to handover tasks that will free up over 15 hours per week for a senior team member.

Seriously: 15 hours PER WEEK!!

You can watch this video to find out how.

The same mistakes keep happening

Does it sometimes feel like the same mistakes keep happening?

Or that you rely on certain team members that you know will do a good job every time, while others seem to struggle?

This is always going be the case if you don't provide clear guidance that employees can refer to when they need it.

It simply doesn't work to provide some training, or share some advice in a meeting, and expect everyone to remember what to do, every time.

show-people-what-to-do-in-a-meeting

This problem is going to hold your business back, and cause a ton of stress for everyone involved.

So how do we fix it?

The solution is to create checklists that make it clear how the best people in your team perform each task.

With the checklists in place, you need to hold your team accountable for actually using them. In AirManual, this is easy to do as you can see when your team are using checklists, and when important tasks have been forgotten.

Then, when someone makes a mistake, you can simply update the relevant checklist to make sure it doesn't happen again.

give-your-team-a-checklist

Employees not quickly or fully onboarded

The third big problem that your manual will help with is onboarding new team members.

For most teams:

Onboarding a new employee is a huge distraction to the rest of the team, with tens or even hundreds of hours spent supporting each new joiner
New team members take weeks before they start adding significant value to the team<
And onboarding stops too soon, with new team members still making a lot of mistakes and not feeling confident in all areas of their role.

Your team manual can be an absolute game-changer here.

Using checklists for tasks, training and onboarding, we can make the entire onboarding process self-service.

This is a huge win for the new employee — they can move at their own pace, start feeling productive in their first week, use time with their manager to ask for help where they really need it, and continue growing until they're truly confident in all areas of their role.

And it's a huge win for the manager and team. We often see managers reducing the time they need to spend with new joiners in their first weeks from 10–20 hours, down to just 1 or 2 hours.

with-and-without-self-service-onboarding

Being reliant on key people

Our fourth and final big problem is being too reliant on certain key team members.

This might be your CEO or another leader, or it could be someone in Finance, IT, or any other area of the business.

On a day-to-day basis, you might feel like these people are bottlenecks and slow down progress. But the bigger issue is what happens when they're not available or leave the team.

This can quickly cost your team days, weeks, or even months as they try to cover and work around the missing team member.

Using a team manual, this is also easy to fix.

Think about what would need to happen if the key person was going on a 4 week holiday. Which tasks could be easily handed over? Which tasks could not?

Starting with the tasks that would cause your team the most pain, document each task and make sure at least one person is happy to do it.

There’s one other really important step — get that 4 week holiday booked!

It's likely that your key people haven't had a long and relaxing holiday for too long, and getting it booked is the perfect catalyst to fixing this, permanently.

book-yourself-a-4-week-holiday