3 Ways to Train Your Team as a Small Business (Easily)

Odds are you and I have heard the same advice. If there's an issue with your employees or your contractors or your subcontractors, well, it's probably down to a training issue. You need to train your employees to do things the way you need them to do in order for you to finally take a rest. Problem is, training is really expensive. Am I the only one that thinks this? Taking the time out of your super busy work week to teach somebody how to do something, to create an online course for your employees to have a six week paid training bootcamp. I mean, those kinds of options are amazing. But how many small businesses with just a few employees or no employees can actually afford to do that? My name is Layla and I'm a process and ClickUp consultant. I work with a lot of different business owners inside our membership community to help them systemize and delegate pieces of their business. And a big chunk of that conversation does end up circling back to the world of training. Now, how is it that I'm sitting here telling you training is super expensive, but then I work with really small businesses and small teams as they train? You don't have to train like the big businesses do if you only have a few employees. There is another way. So in this video, I'm going to break down three of the most common training solutions that I use and that my clients use when it comes to their small team. Now, before we start, I want to encourage you to participate. Scroll down below this video and leave me a comment telling me how you currently train your team members, if at all. I mean, if nothing is the answer, leave that below because I want to have a sense of where you're starting from and maybe we'll even get some new ideas for a part two of this video. Okay, now with that out of the way, let's go to option one, the first way to go about training your team on the cheap. The first one is what I call the Resource Hub. This is super, super simple. Basically, our driving mindset here is to never have to repeat ourselves. What we want to have is one collective resource area where everything we know is there. We use a tool called ClickUp at ProcessDriven here, and this is what that looks like. We have one folder called the Toolbox and a bunch of lists for different things that we have in it and that every resource we have in the business is thrown in here, grouped out by sections. This gives one spot for someone when they're lost or they need help with something. They ask me a question and almost every time the answer is either in this area or I can put it in this area and send them the link. My goal here is to not repeat myself ever and basically build this archive of knowledge that is out of my head and out of my team's head. So now maybe they don't even need to ask me for that information. They can just go into this area and search for it instead. This is like the baby small business version of having an online course for your employees, which you might be familiar with. Some bigger companies, they'll have an online training course that all new employees go through. Well, this isn't quite that, but it gets you in that direction where you're at least collecting all the resources and maybe down the line you're you put them in an order for your new employees to go through. And in case anyone's wondering, yes, absolutely, resources like this still count as training. They're still getting information into people's heads and helping them do their job better. Just because this is just text does not mean it is not training and it does not count. This absolutely can help you kind of guide behaviors and help people achieve the outcomes you want them to have when it comes to the workplace. The examples I have inside this toolbox here in my company are software wikis. So information about tools. We use SOPs, which are our recipes and our instructions for common tasks. We do automation docs, which kind of document all of the things we have automatically happening in our business and explain how they work. And reference links and files, which is what you're seeing right here. This is where we have things like our brand guide, our core values, terms and conditions, commonly used links or phone numbers. All of that stuff is all thrown here in this kind of reference area. Does that make sense? I hope so. All right, let's press on to the second way to train your team on the cheap with a low amount of time or money commitment on your end. And that is to schedule it. Now, I will admit scheduling it, this approach I'm going to talk about is a little bit more expensive in terms of time than the other other method I just talked about. But I think it's an important one to include by scheduling it. What I mean is to create a space on your team for ongoing learning. Learning and training is often something we think about as an onboarding activity. Right. New hire starts, train them. But as anyone who actually does training for a living can tell you, training isn't a once and done thing. Right. You don't go to first grade and then just stop. You have to go through an ongoing process of continuing to refine your skills to achieve mastery in something. So we need to expect the same thing out of our employees in addition to maybe just having some resources on that first day. Create an ongoing event. Okay, so we do it here at ProcessDriven as a lunch and learn every single month for, I think about 45 minutes an hour. We get together on a video call and we learned about something. To date, we've talked about topics like how to write better emails and how to use certain software that confuses people. We've also talked about our ClickUp account, which again is a tool that we use at ProcessDriven. Moving forward, we're getting into more and more soft skills sessions. We're continuing to evolve the topics we cover over time based on what the team needs. I'm secretly hoping we will have a how to brew better coffee lunch and learn one of these days. But the concept behind this is put an hour or 45 minutes on the calendar on a regular basis and have it be someone's job to always book someone for that event. So we see Lara here is on Team ProcessDriven. Her job every single month is to make sure that we have an interesting lunch and learning that'll benefit the team for the next month. This would be something that is relatively simple, although a little bit more time consuming that I would suggest you implement. If you want cheap and easy yet effective training, put this on the calendar for your team and have someone who understands your team's needs and challenges. Pick something, pick a topic to talk about and discuss over virtual or in person lunch. Like I've already said, some topics we've covered here in our lunch and learns are about how to write emails or how to use software. But we're also playing around with more exciting topics in the future like how to negotiate and how to make better coffee and other kinds of things that will help grow our team not just as workers, but also as people. And our goal is to get our overall team skillset and and knowledge as professionals up a higher notch than where people are when they started working with us. So, long story short, option number two for how to train is to build a scheduled event into the normal, require it or strongly recommend it for all relevant employees and just wash, rinse and repeat. By making time and putting it on the actual calendar, you'll guarantee that training doesn't get forgotten and you ensure training isn't just a thing for the new people. Now, I have one more recommendation for budget employee training here, but before we go into it, I want to do a quick reminder for you for a behavior I'd like to train you to do, and that is to go down below this video and click like and subscribe. It costs you nothing at all. It's absolutely free. But it helps this video show up to more people. So it's kind of like a payment to me for all the time we've put into this video. So if you could help us out, I'd appreciate that. While the other two options we've talked about so so far require someone with smarts telling other people, here's my smarts. In this example, we want to just acknowledge the knowledge that other people already have. So for the 30% of you here who have already subscribed to this video, all hail. You are amazing. Thank you so much. Wow. How great are you? That is kind of what celebration could look like. All you need to do for this one is to work celebrations into into some kind of normal meeting you might have with your team. Here's an actual example of timestamps from a meeting we had here at Team ProcessDriven where each month. Nope, not each month. Twice a month. Oh gosh, twice each month we have the team get together and we go over a bunch of different things. And one agenda item is called the shout outs, where we basically shout out anybody who has been killing it in some way doing a great job. This is done verbally, but these are just the notes that we took from the session. But if we can find people who are doing the things we want to do or we want others to do and applaud them for it, that in and of itself is kind of instantaneous training. If we really say, you know, we want to have more people replying to emails promptly, well, we could have an hour long training about how to respond to emails more promptly, or as in maybe easier. First step, we could go to the next team meeting and say, hey tj, great job responding to emails so quickly. How do you do it? And maybe he has a two minute explanation of how he's gone about doing it and he's really happy to be shouted out and everyone else is listening about how TJ is getting accolades for responding to emails quickly. That is what we want to do. Yes, this doesn't feel like training, but it is. It's reinforcing the behaviors we want to see. So that way, if we ever need to correct a behavior, well, at least we've counterbalanced it by all this positive reinforcement. When things are going the way we want them to do, do to go, not to do. Building a culture of encouragement can feel a little soft, but I just want to emphasize how simple this is and how big the returns can be. Just bringing it into your next daily standup or your weekly team meeting can go a really long way if you're trying to encourage the team to say, switch softwares, practice a different method of sales, whatever the thing is you're trying to have happened. The other added benefit of this approach is that you start to put your team on pedestals in some way. You help them feel good about themselves and that way the next person someone is struggling with, say, responding to emails quickly, they can remember, ah, TJ's really good at this. Let me ask that person. Side note, that means you don't have to teach everybody. TJ could then teach other people how to respond to emails more quickly and you can take a step to the side. So I know those are a bit unorthodox, but those are the three simple budget and time friendly methods I would recommend for getting into the world of training with your small team. Have some space for this without breaking the bank at the same time. With that, I want to ask you in the comments below, scroll down to your answer from below of what you're currently doing for training and shoot me a new reply letting me know if there's any of these tactics or even something else you saw that you might be willing to try. Perhaps next week. All of the ones on here that I've already talked through can be done really quickly, whether it's creating a centralized hub for all of your resources like one big Google Doc, whether it's scheduling an ongoing weekly or monthly lunch and learn or other kind of session for your team, or whether it's having a new agenda item onto your weekly team meeting. All of these can be done in less than 10 minutes to at least plan them out and then it's just a matter of doing them. So so tell me in the comments below which, if any, are you willing to try next week? Thanks so much for watching. And again, please like and subscribe if you haven't already. I'll see you back here next week for another video about process ClickUp and everything in between. Until next time. Enjoy the process.