Full Trainual Review & Demo

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the blue collar nerd. And in this video we're visiting another topic very near and dear to my heart. Standard operating procedure. Standard operating procedures or SOPs. They are the documented processes that run your company. And documented processes are vitally important for any business to have. Why? Well, that's a great question. I'm glad you hypothetically asked. First of all, having documented processes makes for happier employees because it gives employees more autonomy and freedom and it takes away that kind of feeling of chaos that can exist if you don't have this. It's not a good feeling as an employee to run into a problem and not know how to solve it and feel like the only way that you can solve it is to rely on another person. You're dependent on somebody else. And it also sucks as an employee to have to ask somebody maybe even something that you were taught before, but it just isn't something that happens that often. And now it's come up and you forgot what you were taught. So now you have to go to probably a manager and admit to them that you forgot something that they told you. And that can be a little bit embarrassing. And sometimes that embarrassment can prevent employees from asking the question in the first place, which then of course leads to mistakes, which leads to that employee being blamed for those mistakes, which leads to that employee feeling even more dissatisfied at their job. Whereas if you do have a database of documented processes, then the employee can quickly just reference the process. Oh yeah, that's right, I remember. Take care of it correctly the first time. And now, in addition to making employees lives easier, documenting processes also improves the lives of owners and managers, because it's exactly the other side of that coin. If you're watching this and you are or have been a business owner or manager, then you know the pain and frustration of answering the same questions over and over. And you know the frustration that comes with somebody doing something wrong. And you're like, ah, we just talked about this in the meeting two days ago. So if you've got your processes documented, then one, that means that employees don't need to go to you every time they have a question. And two, it means that any feedback that you give to employees is always fair feedback because we've removed all the hearsay. He said, she said of oh well, they told me to do it like this. No, I didn't. I told you to do it like that. All of that's gone. If a mistake gets made, step one, we ask the question Was there a process documented? If there was no process, then we do not blame the employee, we blame the lack of process. Step two, if there was a process, we ask did the employee follow this process correctly? And if they didn't, then that fault falls on the employee. But if they did follow the process and something still went wrong, they then that fault lies on the process itself, not the employee. So then we simply refine the process in question to address the thing that happened to make sure it doesn't happen in the future. And then no employee has to feel blamed for something that they don't feel was their fault. And no manager has to give an employee critical feedback without very objective proof of here's what went wrong and here's how to fix it. Next, documented processes make your company scalable. If you're a small business trying to grow, then you're going to find at some point that you hit a plateau that's just impossible to break through with without documenting your processes. The chaos just kind of takes over, the inefficiencies compound and you'll just feel like you've hit this ceiling. And going back to the previous points, growing the company is beneficial for both employees and employers, but it's also very helpful to employees because it provides them growth opportunity. If I'm a customer service rep who's answering phones, but I went to school for marketing and that's where my passions lie. Well, if the company that I'm currently working for answering the phones for is too small to justify having an in house marketing person, then the only way that I get a position like that is by leaving. Same with any position. If I'm a dispatcher and I've been doing that for a few years and I'm not satisfied with my salary anymore, I'm ready to move on and maybe I'd like a management position. If you don't have any management positions for them, their only other choice is to leave you. This also makes it really hard for you as a manager or business owner to retain good people because good people are gonna realize that they're good and they're gonna want more, be that more as far as their title and position or more in terms of pay. And if you're not able to provide that, they're, they're going to leave. And it's unfortunate. I see this a lot, especially with small business owners. They get this like rock star employee that eventually leaves and they take it really personally and it hurts them. But a lot of the times it's like, well, but did you really give them any other choice other than stay and be dissatisfied. Now, also, if you're a manager or business owner, then having documented operating procedures ensures that the business can run without you, which inevitably, eventually, it's going to have to do, either because you sell the company or pass it on to a family member or something else happens to you. You're a mortal being. And I'm very sorry. I know that when you were clicking on this video about standard operating procedure, you were probably not anticipating that I was going to make you contemplate your own mortality, but here we are. You owe it to the people whose livelihoods depend on your company to ensure that that company can run without you. Plus, if selling the company is something that you decide to do, then having these documented procedures makes your company more valuable, both because one, it probably enabled it to grow bigger than it would have otherwise, but also it means that that work is taken away from the entity that's buying the company. The buyer can already see that this company can in fact run without you, and so they're not so worried about having to get their hands dirty, you know, getting in there and building the processes out themselves so that it can run without you. Anyways, with all that said, hopefully you're convinced by now. Let's jump into a demo of the software that I'm showing off today, which is called Trainual. Now, if you've followed me for a while, then you might know that I've recommended Suite Process in the past. I don't want anybody who's seen that content to think that I've turned on Suite Process. I still think suiteprocess is a great software. It's just not the only one out there. So today we're going to look at another option, Trainual. Okay, so here we are on the Trainual home screen. By the way, I do want to point out if after watching this video, you decide you want to sign up for Trainual. I do have an affiliate link in the description down below. Trainual is not sponsoring this video, nor do they have any editorial rights as far as what I say in the video. But. But they do have an affiliate program. So if you sign up using that link, it won't cost you anything extra. But trainywool will send me a few bucks for sending them the business. I'll also say that if you happen to be an H VAC or plumbing company, that's my expertise. And so I've built out a bunch of processes and policies and procedures and things for you to use. Should you choose to sign up using my affiliate link and I'll give you more details on that towards the end of the video. Anyways, back to the home screen. So, first of all, I want to point out that when you first set up your company account, you're able to kind of customize the colors a little bit so it matches your branding. This example account I have here is just all white, but you can see I have the logo up here and I could change some of these colors around if I wanted to match my branding a little better. So on the home screen here, I have a few tabs, the first one being to do so in Trainual, you're able to assign processes as tasks to employees. If you want to do that. For example, maybe you have some trainings and things that you need everybody to go through during onboarding. For example, I have this welcome to the company process here that I can click Start and then I kind of go through this welcome that gives me some information about the company and tells me what to expect next. It's got the company's origin story, how we got to where we are today, where does the name of the company come from, mission, core values, vision statements, things like that. You get the idea. You can see it's tracking my project here, so I'm now 50% done. I've got these two topics completed and these two not started. Okay, back on the homepage again, you can see my progress is being tracked there. Now, the next tab on the home screen is owned by you. So in Trainual, you are able to assign owners to processes, which is basically saying like, hey, you own this process, so it's up to you to like, keep it up to date and things like that. That way there's not just like one poor person who's entirely responsible for building and maintaining this entire knowledge base of processes. Different people can own their own sets. Okay, then we have a completed tab, and that would be any to dos that I've completed. And finally I have a tab called Reference, and that is where I can see anything that I am given permission to like. I have access to view it, but it's not assigned to me as a task. It's just there for me to look at it when I need it. Okay, next, here on the side navigation bar we have the Content tab, and that is where we can see all of the company's content. Now, I am logged in as an administrator right now, so I can see every process, every policy, every company subject. I'll talk about what those things mean later. But I can see them all. Now. If I weren't an admin and I only had permission to see some of these, then depending on how things are set up, the ones that I don't have permission to see will either not show up at all or I will see the title of it. And then there will be a request access button next to it. And then an admin could grant me access if they chose to do so. Okay, now let's talk about how content is organized inside of trainual. So we have subjects, topics and steps. So for example, right here I have a subject onboarding a new employee. And if I expand that, then there are two topics within that subject. There's field employee and office employee. So if I were onboarding a field employee, I would expand that. And then inside of that is all of these steps. And right now I'm just looking at an overview screen. I would click into it if I wanted to see more detail, like what we've got here. And I'll go into some detail about what you're able to insert into these in just a minute. Okay, so that's like the hierarchy, Subject, topic and step. Now any subject, the main folder that can fall under company policies or processes. So let's look at processes here. Processes are gonna be like things that employees do. Step by step, instructions on how to do those things. For example, here's a process on happy calls, here's a process on responding to reviews, et cetera. These are tasks that employees may need to complete. Now policies are more just like umbrella things. They're not really tasks. It's just like here are the rules. For example, we've got a no smoking policy here, an office pet policy. And we've got technician and office employee dress codes. And then company is stuff that's like just res. Basically it's not a task for an employee to complete. And it's not rules. It's just like a helpful resource. This could be kind of HR focused, things like that. Welcome to the company onboarding subject that I showed you earlier. In here I've got some KPIs, some field manager KPIs, that just shows you know, what they're being held accountable to and how they're able to affect their KPIs, H VAC and plumbing industry basics for office staff. So that's kind of like more of a training oriented thing. And I also have in here a bunch of job descriptions and here's a preview of what those look like. Again, if you happen to be an H Vac or plumbing company. And you want these, they are going to be available to you should you choose to sign up. Okay, now let's walk through what it looks like to build one of these. I've already built out basically everything that I can think that makes sense to build out. But let's say we're going to do a van washing process here. I already have one, but for example sake, I'm going to make another one. So I'm going to come up here to Create Subject and I have the choices to make something from scratch. I can import a template or I can import a document. So these two options are pretty handy. Let's start with from a template. So Trangul offers to you a library of templates, things that are going to apply to like a lot of companies. For example the tech, we use brand standards, office policies, so you can pull those in to have a starting place. Now in my experience these are great for things that are like basic and there's not a whole lot of ways to do them. For example, like an office opening and closing procedure. This will offer you a great starting place for something like that. The more specific things, I feel like it varies so much company to company that it becomes a little less valuable to have a template. For example, again, if you happen to be a Service Titan user, they actually have a couple of Service Titan specific templates. But personally I don't recommend using them. They're too vague. They feel like they're written by people who have read a lot about Service Titan and looked into Service Titan but haven't actually run a business on Service Titan, which is probably the case. Okay, now back up here on the Create Subject menu we also have this import document feature. So if you've already got some processes written out somewhere but they're just not housed in a nice knowledge base software like this, you can actually just import those into Trainual and when you do that it's going to use a little bit of AI magic to determine for itself what should be the subject, the topics and the steps. Honestly, in my experience the document importer, it's good when it works, not perfect and then sometimes it doesn't work. Initially when I was testing actually I couldn't get the document importer to work at all. But I did talk to Support, they were very responsive, very nice. Although the issue did kind of just self resolve. It just started working. But then once it was working I still found it to be a little bit finicky. It doesn't love if you have like a lot of pictures or strange characters in your processes that you're trying to import. So if you've got a lot of that, you might have to strip them out first, but that's still a lot less work than starting everything from scratch. But anyways, for this example, I am going to say we're going to start from scratch here. So I'm going to put in the subject name. We said we were going to do van washing. I'm going to put example in my title just so I know to get rid of this later, because I already have one. Okay, then I choose whether this subject should be categorized as company policies or processes. For me, this is a process and that's what's already selected. So we're good there. Okay, then I can choose to assign an owner. So if I'm like, hey, I'm going to write this out, but then from then on it's going to be Joe's job to keep this updated and manage it. Then I would select him here now he's the owner. I could enter in a description of the subject. And then there's also this dropdown that asked me to choose a collection. This dropdown is probably not going to be here much longer because this is referring to a feature that's been replaced. Collections are now groups, and we'll get into groups later. Okay, then we can click down here to show the advanced subject settings. So the first checkbox here default required completion on subject assignment. That just means if I assign this to a person or a group of people, it's going to be assigned to them, like as a to do, they're going to be required to complete it. For this example, I'm going to uncheck that. I'm going to say this is just for reference. Force order of content completion. That's if I was assigning it as a to do that needed to be completed, am I going to force them to complete it, start to finish in that order? Or can they skip around, set a due date? That again is for if I'm assigning this as a to do, I can check that off and say it's due in a week, it's due in two weeks, or it's due in a custom number of days. Then we have set an expiration date. Again, this is for if I'm assigning it as a to do, I can set a number of days where they need to get it done in this amount of days or else their completion bar is going to go back to zero percent. So for example, if this were like some sort of training that I was trying to send a new employee through, I could say, okay, you need to complete this training within 30 days. And after 30 days, if you're not done, we're going to reset the bar to zero because it needs to not be so scattered. You're going to retain it better if you go through it more quickly. Okay, then we have this checkbox add to the content page. So I referred to this earlier, actually. This determines whether somebody who's not assigned to this subject, if they go to the content page, will they still see it with the option to click Request Access, or will they simply not see it at all? We can choose to lock content editing. If we're like, this is in a good place, I'm happy with where this is and I don't want anybody to change it, no matter what, then you can choose to lock it. And then only admins and subject owners are able to lock and unlock subjects and then display owner name. If the subject has an owner, do you want to show who that is? All right, click Create here. Okay, so now I've got my subject here, and I can create topics inside of the subject. I can also click this here to add an emoji to make it a little bit more visually appealing. We'll make it a sponge. And then we're going to create our topic. Now, this is a minor complaint that I do have about triangle. You always have to have subject and topic. But for an example like this van washing, my only topic inside of that is going to be how we wash our vans. So the way their structure works, I mean, it basically forces me to put something into a folder, even if I'm only putting one thing in there. In which case, what's really the point of the folder? It's a minor thing, though. It's not a big deal. All right, so I'm going to say create topic, and then we're going to click into that where I can add my steps. So we'll say step one is to park the vans next to each other, windshields facing the building. And then if I feel like that needs more description, I can put that down here. I've got lots of formatting tools up here. I can bold, italic, underline, I can make bolded lists, change the font, all kinds of stuff to make it look visually appealing. And then up here I also have this insert tab. And we've got lots of really handy stuff in here. I particularly, particularly like this record button. So if you wanted to make a screen recording, you could actually do that directly here in Trainual I would just click this start recording button. See, there I am. It uses loom, which is a screen recording software, but it's fully integrated into here. You don't have to have a LOOM account to use this, which is really cool. I like that a lot. Next to that we also have this compose button. This is an AI feature. So by now you're probably familiar with like ChatGPT. It's the same kind of basic language model concept where you can type in what you want it to do and it will spit out a result for you. This is really handy, but it's more handy in some situations than others. Like for what we're doing right now, washing vans, maybe we'll get a good result. We'll try it. I'm going to give it some bullet points on washing the van and I'm going to hit compose and let's see what we get. Yeah, so this time it kind of just gave me one long block of text and it's really only talking about one particular bullet that I gave it which was parking with the windshields facing the building. So yeah, my experience with this Compose AI feature has been very mixed. Sometimes I can tell it what I want and it does spit out a pretty nice like multi step process for me. But other times I give it like I just did like multiple bullets and it gives me a very long block of text about only one of the bullets. Like it'll just do some weird stuff. I'm glad that this is here. I'm glad that Trainual is thinking about AI and how to incorporate it into their product. But as of the time of me recording this video in my tests, it's just not very helpful. I would rather just have ChatGPT open in another tab and just use that. But anyways, we can also quickly insert videos, images, links, other triangle URLs. We can attach files, we can put in tables and emojis and icons, all kinds of really useful stuff. And I'll show you some examples of those things in processes that I have fleshed out already. But for now, let's say hypothetically, we finished filling out all of these steps. Obviously this is not a complete process, but let's prepare, pretend it is. Let's maybe assign an emoji to this topic here. This looks van enough to me. Okay, so currently you can see I've got one topic in here and it's in a draft state. So I could hit publish in order to publish it to the company. When I hit publish it's going to tell me that I have a topic in here that's in a draft state. So I'm going to go ahead and say I want to make that finished. When I click Publish, it's going to tell me that I have a topic in here that's still in a draft state, but I'm going to say finish all and publish. Okay, so now that is marked finished and it is published. Now I need to choose who is able to see this. And to do that I'm going to click share right here. And then I can choose to share this with either individuals or groups. So I have a group called Field Staff, so I would share it with them. And you can group people up lots of different ways. I'll show you that in just a minute. Now we also have this checkbox here. Whether completion is required. That's basically, hey, am I going to be assigning this to these people as a task or am I just giving them access to it for reference? And I can also adjust the access. So right now Field Staff has just a view access so they can look at it, but they can't edit it and they can't change who else can see it. I could give them edit access so that they could make edits, or I could give them full access so that they can make edits and they can do what I'm doing now. Adjust who can see it and stuff. I think just View probably makes the most sense in most cases. Anybody that's an admin, by the way, has full access by default and that is locked. You can't change that. And we'll hit save and there you go. That's the basic process of building out a process. Oh, one thing I didn't show you is that in addition to putting topics inside of subjects, you can also make tests so you can embed quizzes. I have an example of that here in my H Vac and plumbing industry basics for office staff. So you can see all of the topics here and then quizzes built in in between them. So if I were going through this as an employee, okay, here's the introduction. You can see you could put like GIFS and stuff in here to make it a little bit more fun, I would click next topic. Now it's telling me to watch this video on how air conditioning works by this handsome gentleman right here. So I would watch that video and then I would move on to the test that's going to make sure that I absorbed the information contained in that video. Now I'm an admin and I'm looking at the admin view so I can see the answers. But if I toggle that off, I can click Start now. And then this is what the quiz would look like to an employee. You're able to set a minimum passing score, so you've got to get like an 85% or better to move on. And there's lots of other cool options when you're building out the test. Like you can choose to automatically randomize the available answer so that you don't have to consciously think about, oh, have I made answer number one? The correct answer? Too many times. You can just have it randomized. Really cool stuff. And by the way, again, if you happen to be an H VAC or a plumbing company, you can have all this. Just saying, I already built it for you. Okay, something else that's pretty cool that I'll point out. Let's say we made some sort of edit to anything, a process, a policy, whatever. You can then come to this menu and say share changes and then everybody who is assigned to this will be notified that you updated the process or the policy, whatever it is. Also, if you have to dos, if you have things assigned to you, trangual will kind of nag you with emails just poking you to say, hey, you need to finish this. Definitely helpful to keep people on track. Okay, so let's talk about the groups page. Now this is where you can group people together and you can do that multiple ways. You can group them together by role, by department, by by location or other. So for me I have location as field staff and office staff. I have different departments, install management, sales service, different roles. And this just gives me granularity for when I am sharing subjects out who I want to share it to train you will also has reporting. This is mainly for when you're assigning things as tasks so you can keep track of people's progress and you can track that by subject or by individuals, individual people. And you also have this latest activity tab that's basically just like an audit trail of everything that's happened in the account. So you see here I just added the subject van washing example to the group field staff. Okay, now I skipped over this people tab. Let's go in there. Here we've got two things. A directory that's just everybody who's on the account. But we also have a very, very helpful feature which is you can build an org chart much like standard operating procedures. Org charts are a very important thing that every business ought to have. You can build an org chart by individual people and you can also build one with just roles. I always like to start with roles. I think that's the more valuable out of the two because people, you know, they do come and go from a company. But an org chart built by role is the permanent template for this is how this company is structured. So let's build one here. I've got a couple of roles already built out. I've got a dispatcher and an operations manager. It's got some suggestions here for me, which is very handy. We'll add a CEO, a service manager, install manager, CSR manager. Csr. We'll say accountant. Maybe we'll also have a separate bookkeeper. All right, that's at least a good starting place. Let's say save. We're going to choose our highest ranking role, which in this case is going to be CEO. And now this is another area where Triangle has an AI feature. So you can click this button to generate a role chart. If you're building out a really big role chart, this might be helpful to at least give you a starting place. In my experience anyways, you're probably going to have to make some edits, but let's just click it and see what it does. All right, so let's see what it did here. So this is actually pretty good. This is a better result than I got the first time. I don't know if it's learned from what I did in the past. It has dispatchers reporting into the service manager, which in my opinion is the correct structure. Dispatchers are essentially assistant service managers. But I remember moving that one last time. So that's interesting. This is a pretty good result. Although I have an operations manager and I would like for all of the other managers to basically report in to them. So operations manager reports to the CEO, but let's say my install manager reports into the operations manager. Same with the sales manager and the service manager. Oh, and the CSR manager. Okay, so that's a decent, you know, basic org chart. We would probably want to flesh this out a little bit more, but you get the idea. And I really love this feature. I'm so happy that this is included. One more thing that I wanted to talk about. So you see we have a search bar up here and we also have a search bar here. The one down here is more your basic old school search. So if I'm looking for an onboarding procedure, I would just type in onboarding and there it is. But the one up here acts as a traditional search or it also has some AI Incorporated, where you can ask IT questions. For example, I could ask can I bring my dog to work? Hit Enter and then I get my answer right up here. Yes, you can bring your dog to work with the prior approval from your manager or supervisor. And it's pulling that from my office pet policy, which it links to for me down here, which is pretty cool. Now this feature is in beta, as noted by this tag over here. But this one in my experience has worked pretty well. But anyways, that is a basic demo of Trangual. Now again, I do have affiliate links in the description box down below. If you decide that you do want to sign up for Trangual, I'd really appreciate you just doing it through that link. And if you do want the processes and policies that I showed off in this video, let me show you how to get those. So first you need an active trainual account. So use the referral link down below, get signed up and go through the basic setup steps. After that I have another link in the description down below to a Google Doc which looks like this. So you see I have some instructions here at the top, but basically on the left side I have the name of the policy or procedure and on the right is a link where you can import it. So you can pick and choose which ones you want to import. So first of all make sure that you are signed into your trainual account. But then all you have to do is pick one that you want to pull in. Let's say we're pulling in HappyCalls. You click on the link, you're taken to this overview screen where you can see what's contained inside. And you can click around and make sure that you do in fact want to pull this in. Keep in mind that you will be able to edit anything that you import so you don't have to use the stuff exactly as it is. And if you do want to import it, then at the top of the screen you see this blue bar here you have a button that says get it. Now simply click on that and click copy and go. And that's going to copy it into your Trainual account. And you would just simply repeat for every process that you want to import. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Be sure to hit like if you liked the video and found it valuable, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel. If you haven't done that already, hit that bell icon so that YouTube notifies you anytime I upload a new video. Appreciate it. Peace. Sam.