5 Steps to Onboard a Hire without SOPs...while still feeling prepared!

If you're looking forward to your first or your next hire, you're probably feeling a little worried. You want to make sure that that new person is set up for success, that they know what they need to do and that you as the leader, manager or business owner, you are putting your best foot forward. And if you're an anxious Googler like I am, you might be spending some time searching on YouTube or on Google how to prepare for your new hire. You've probably seen quite a few different articles and videos where recommend the value of SOPs or standard operating procedures. A lot of articles will say before you get that new hire, create your SOPs, create your systems, document everything. And I'm here to tell you don't. In this video I'm going to share what I have learned from working with 1200 teams across industries as they hire, as they scale, as they systemize, as they sell their businesses. And I want to share kind of a lesson I have learned by working with all these clients about where SOPs can work for you in the new hire journey. In my opinion, creating all of your SOPs prior to that new hire starting is a luxury. It can be nice to do, it can feel good, but for most businesses or teams, it is not required. I'm going to repeat that. Not required. I'm the SOP process geek here, telling you SOPs prior to hiring is a luxury and not a necessity. In this video I want to explain why I believe that first up and then I'm going to suggest an alternative way to look at SOPs that allows you to still be process driven and system centric, but not have to create every single SOP before you even get started. So with that, let's start off with a little bit of negativity here and let me tell you why I don't think the cookie cutter advice of getting all your SOPs together is truly necessary. All right, three reasons for you. Let's start off with number one. The very first reason I don't think SOPs are necessary before that new hire arrives is a matter of reality for most teams. Whether you're in a non profit, whether you're, you know, managing a soccer club, whether you are a business owner, the reason you are hiring is because you don't have time, right? You don't have enough time to do the work you need to do to fulfill the orders, to work, man the machines, to do the job, to do the remodel, you're turning business down. That's why you're hiring, because you have no Time. In my experience, if we say SOPs need to be done before the new hire starts, we are adding an unnecessary wait and delay to the process that doesn't need to be there because you have no time. Let's use your time on the most essential things and everything else that can wait. Let's have that wait. And in this case, I believe SOPs can be something we wait on in the method. I'll show you at the end of this video, and it'll keep us from having to delay that hiring process. If you're like most people, the slower you are to get that help, the more business you are turning away in the meantime. The more weekends you're working in the meantime, the more stressed you are in the meantime. For most people, yes, we want to hire slow, but we don't need to hire in slow motion. Okay, Reason number one to skip the whole SOP flurry is because we don't have the time to do it. If you're the exception here and you're hiring just because you got a big round of funding and you don't really care about time, by all means. But for the rest of us normal people, time is a very good argument for putting off the SOPs. So beyond the practical realities of you not having time to do sops, I also want to address the fact that sops and many other forms of planning can actually be a bit of a crutch. This is my second reason for saying SOPs are not necessary. Because if we say they are, we're all of a sudden giving the nervous hiring person a way to procrastinate while feeling productive. And to me, productive procrastination is definitely a thing, but it can be a very dangerous area, particularly for business owners where they have extremely small teams. For many folks that I've worked with telling them those SOPs need to be in order become a great way for them to say, okay, fine, I'm just going to focus on these SOPs for the next 50 hours. I'm going to be writing SOPs for every little thing that might come up. And all of a sudden, to get in those 50 hours of work, they're pushing off and pushing off and pushing off hiring. They still feel good because they're spending time planning, but they're not actually doing anything that moves the business or the hiring process forward. So related to the first piece of not having time, the second reason I like to push off SOPs is to avoid having SOPs become a crutch or a way to procrastinate. Something that is as important as hiring. So reason number one and reason number two are pretty related. One, you don't have time. Two, if you do have time, this isn't the best place to be spending it. The third reason though, that I would want you to wait on SOPs comes down to your usefulness. Accuracy. If you are sitting there writing sops as the leader or manager or boss person, and you're sitting there trying to picture in your mind's eye what that person that you haven't really worked with yet is going to need to know or to think, or to be able to do, you are going to be writing an SOP based on a pile of assumptions. You're not going to know what terms that new person knows. You're not going to know what screenshots or forms of communication are going to be most effective for, for that new hire. Hell, you don't even really know what SOPs that person even needs. You are putting your knowledge into a document in a very one sided conversation. You're trying to build the basically the virtual office, the constraints for a person you don't even know. And to me that's a poor use of time. If we want to make sure an SOP is useful by the daily doer, whoever it is that's performing the task, the best thing we can do is have that worker be involved in the SOP process or the SOP revision. If we are sitting there and creating these SOPs from scratch in our head, as if we were just, you know, guessing in this imaginary petri dish of a world, we are not putting our best foot forward. Not only is it a waste of time, not only is it a form of procrastination, but we are not going to get as strong of an SOP as we would if the worker were the one writing them, or if we were doing it based on real world knowledge and real understanding of the challenge areas. So the third reason to not write those SOPs is because you, as magical and wonderful and super as you are, you are not the right person to be doing them. Sorry. I mean, I'm sure you're not sorry about that. You're probably pretty happy to be able to get this off your to do list. But it's true, you are not the best person to be writing these instructions, but the new hire should be writing these instructions. The only exception to this I would call out is if you are hiring for an established position, if you are a larger team where you're hiring for a role that already exists, sure, perhaps the workers who already exist in that role can tune things up. But I'm operating throughout this entire video under the assumption that we are creating SOPs for something new or unfamiliar. And in that case, you, Mr. Leader misleader person Leader, you are not the appropriate person to be writing these. It's a waste of everybody's time and it's not the best return on your time. Three reasons there on why to not bother Now I've just ripped apart what most people say is the thing you should be doing before you hire. So what's the alternative here? Well, should we just be hiring without a plan? Just wing it. Just make it up as we go, say, hey, welcome to your first day. What do you feel like doing? No? Okay. There is a big area in between having all of our SOPs documented and completely winging it. And what I want us to get to is a nice middle ground, which is what I'm going to be talking through in the next half of this video. Before I do that though, take a second. Make sure you're still with me. Pause this video if you need to, and drop a comment below if you have any questions about what I just talked about. I know this was a lot. Let's move on to part two. What do we do instead? Now, if you and I were friends and we were at a co working space and you were saying, hey Layla, I'm hiring my first team member. What do you think I need to do to get ready for what they need to do? What I would tell you is step one, define the responsibilities. And you might say, but Layla, I've already done this. I have a job description and it has all these things in it. Generally speaking, by responsibilities, I want you to go to a greater level of detail than what you might see in a job description. For example, a job description might say, manage our brand voice. What does that mean? A job description might say ad hoc tasks as assigned, special projects as needed. We don't want to worry about any of that kind of, I don't know, ad hoc, unpredictable stuff at this point. So to list off some examples, a virtual assistant you might hire might have responsibilities like taking notes during meetings, sorting the email inbox for this EO or whoever they're assisting, replying to social media comments, and responding to internal communication such as internal pings inside your project management system or internal emails. Those four things are pretty good. Summary of what a generalist VA might do if they were working, say two hours or four hours a week for a given business, the responsibilities are going to Scale up as you go up the business and you have more experience roles. I could see a seasoned leadership role having 25 different processes they manage with. Whereas like you saw here, short term part time workers might just be a handful. But what I would want, my friend, if we were in a co working space, right? What I want you to define is exactly where you want this person's time to go in order to give value to the business, to the team and to you. So whatever that looks like, write down these specific activities. These will lead in to sops down the line. But as you can see just in the verbal list I gave you, they're not really that complex to come up with. Sitting here and just writing down a quick list. It should be very simple and just think through where you want this person's time to go. Two quick reminders though before we move on to step two. With this step, make sure we are only including normal activities here. If you want this person, your podcast coordinator, to be involved in something that you haven't even thought of, like a one time project to write a new media kit, that's not something we want to think about here. We want to focus on repeating ongoing obligations that will make the backbone of this role. The second thing I want to say is if you are struggling to come up with this list, if you're like, I don't know, everything I wanted to do is a one time project, I would strongly encourage you to reconsider your hiring plans. Tough love there. We were friends. I would tell you this in the co working space, right? If you cannot come up with at least four, four recurring obligations for that new generalist VA or that executive assistant or that new customer support agent. If you don't have at least four obligations, you may not have a true role that you're hiring for. You might be better off with a one off contract with a freelancer or some kind of more flexible arrangement. Because we do want to have this bedrock of consistency if we are trying to develop a ongoing and consistent role in the team. But I think you know that already. Obligatory disclaimer. Just humor me. All right, so that is number one. The number one step of our alternative path is to define the responsibilities. The second step we want to then do is to look at those responsibilities and you put them in terms of frequency. So for every single responsibility you identified in the previous step, identify how often this will happen. Alright? If there are one or two tasks on this list that have an inconsistent frequency, maybe it's every two days sometimes, and it might Change. It's okay. I want you to define what the normal frequency would be on a normal given week. For example, responding to internal communication. That's something you're probably going to want someone to do every day. Answering the email inbox, probably every day. Scheduling podcast guests, maybe that's every month. Maybe planning new quarterly goals for the marketing department. That might be every quarter. Whatever the cadence is for you, I want you to define this for every single responsibility you defined in the last step. I know at this point some of you are probably like, what is this girl talking about? This has nothing to do with SOPs. I promise we're getting there, we're almost there. But this is what I want you to do for step two. Define that frequency. Are you still with me? Cool. So now we're going to move on to number three. I want you to turn all this stuff that we just talked about together into tasks that are assignable. All I mean by this is to take all the information that you've just written on, maybe your piece of paper where you had the responsibilities and the frequency, and I want you to turn those into tasks inside a task management tool, or if you don't have one, maybe a spreadsheet, something that is shareable with this new hire. It could just be a Word document. I will be fine with that, but preferably we would have something, some kind of task tool. Here I'm using example in ClickUp, but everything I'm showing you can be applied in any task tool you prefer. Here we have some example tasks as I described before, for a generalist virtual assistant. What I'm going to now do is add all the data I have discussed previously. So I want this to recur, let's just say every day, because there's probably going to be meetings every day except for weekends and so on. I'm going to set up every task to recur at the appropriate frequency based on what I decided on the last time. Once they all are in there, you have all your tasks defined, you have all your recurrences set. The last step for this step is to assign these out. So for your new person, whether they're here or they're going to be here, assign all these tasks to them. If you're using a spreadsheet or Word document, you may not have this step, but do what you can in your tool of choice to be able to sign out all of these tasks to the relevant new person. The reason we're doing this is we are now taking all this information you just gathered. You Spent the few minutes here in this video. You gathered it. Woohoo. Let's get this onto their plate starting the day they arrive so it is no longer the weight on your shoulders to get this stuff onto their to do list. These tasks are going to form the bedrock, as I said before, of their normal day to day work. This is not saying you might not want to have some onboarding tasks, some welcome to the team tasks, some one off projects, of course you will have those things, but this is giving you the day to day that again I promise is going to tie into SOPs. Okay, so have all this here in whatever your tool of choice is and let's move on to the next step. All right, so finally we are here in step four. We've got these tasks defined, we've got them assigned, we've got them dated. Now for the SOP piece, Right, the stuff that I promised, how do we connect this back to SOPs? Well, there are a lot of ways to do it, but I'm going to suggest the same simplest method in this video. I will go more in depth than this in other videos which we'll link to at the end. But for now let's assume we're going to keep it super simple. And what I want you to do for every one of these responsibility areas is to paste a SOP template, a blank SOP template, which you probably already have. And if you don't, I will give you one here. But we want to put in a template into this task and what I mean by that is literally copying and pasting a blank structure into every single one of these tasks. That could be in the section of the Google Doc, that could be a section on the spreadsheet, or if you have a task management tool that could be a template that you actually save inside the tool, whatever you prefer. What matters here is that we have preset sections that allow us to have a fill in the blank SOP possible. So I'm going to expand this full page so you can see what this one looks like here. I'll also link to our ultimate guide article in the description below where you can see this broken out and and even copy and paste sections if that's helpful. So check out that in the description if you want to. The three sections we have in this SOP template are purpose, procedure and FAQs. There's a little bit more detail happening in here which you can copy and paste and replicate, but we basically want to take this template, copy and paste it and put it inside every blank task. All we are doing is giving the skeleton of an SOP here. So I'm going to put it inside, sort email inbox, go to the next task, put it inside social media comments and so on. All I'm doing here is giving a fill in the blank skeleton of what I want an SOP to look like. This is something you decide for your organization. If you're not sure what portions you want, why I have the sections I have. Go up to the top and we'll actually link out to a video we have that goes through the parts of an sop. Or again, check out the description if that's more convenient. We've got an ultimate guide that goes over all that I'm talking about here in much more detail. It's totally free. Link in the description. All right, so that is our step. What do we have to do? 4, 4. Add these descriptions into each of your responsibility areas. Now we are just about done our work here. Once you have these responsibilities, the frequency, the assignments and you have the fill in the blank templates that are, yes, blank, you need to sit back and relax, chill out, hire that awesome person, get them ready for their first day, give them their welcome call, send them cookies, I don't care. You do not need to worry about anything else related to SOPs until that first day arrives. Alright? So here's your chill pill. Take it. We'll come back here. You'll do step five once that new hire starts. Alright, so should we imagine that that new hire starts? Should we just wait on this video for like a few more weeks? Nah. Okay, let's just continue this video assuming your new hire has just arrived. Okay, so once your new hire has just arrived, we are ready for step five and that is where we are going to schedule interviews or shadow sessions, whatever you want to call them with that new hire. That is the final step of this process. This is the step that is going to replace you spending hours and hours in a dark Shadowy room creating SOPs in your free time. Instead, we're going to do this step 5. How this is going to work is that you are going to schedule sessions on your Google calendar or whatever calendar you use, video calls or in person. If you are in an in person office, you are going to schedule meetings with this new hire to go over each and every one of these processes that you have identified right here. You're going to have a meeting for taking notes during meetings. That sounds weird, but you're going to have a meeting for sorting the email inbox. You're going to have a meeting for how to reply to social media comments. These could all be one long meeting, or these could be four separate 30 minute meetings. The depth, the detail is going to depend on your communication clarity and their learning style. The goal of these meetings is for you to talk through verbally while showing your screen how to do each of these activities. While you do that, and preferably you're recording it at the same time just as a backup. While you are doing that, the new hire's responsibility is to listen, ask questions, and then their homework assignment after that interview is to take the recording of your conversation and or their notes, whatever you want to give them and have them write a written sop. Fill in the blanks basically after your conversation ends. Okay, so this is an interview in order to gather information to write an sop. Oh, and quick note I should make here. If you are not the expert in the given process, if you don't know how to take notes during a meeting, you're not the right person to teach that new hire. Fine. Have these shadow sessions happen with whoever is currently doing this process. So that way it's as close to real world as possible. That's it. Those are the five steps of the alternative approach. The reason I love this approach and why I think it is better than you, the leader sitting there and panicking about SOPs before the new hire arrives, is by that new hire writing the SOPs, we ensure that they are contributing to the team from day one, even if they quit after one week. Hey, you got a few good sops out. That's fantastic. Which I know is a bit cynical, but hey, it's a way for them to meaningfully contribute. Number two, you are getting SOPs from a new hire's perspective, using the terminology, the concepts, the level of detail they need, which may be a good indication of what future new hires would need. That is a lot better than having an expert write the SOP with expert jargon that other people do not understand. Additionally, because the new hire is writing the SOP in conversation with a current person who knows this process, that current person could look over the SOP and give you multiple perspectives, could revise things and make sure things are accurate, you're giving a meaningful way to collaborate. For a new hire who otherwise may not have a concrete way to contribute and collaborate and get to know the team members. By having this SOP process be part of the onboarding and learning journey, you're ensuring that they're getting to know other people and they're also getting to know how the business works. The final advantage I want to highlight here is the fact that that new hire now has a sense of ownership and buy in in this sop. They are now, even as the newest rookie on the team, they are an expert in something because they now own this sop. They are the originator, the author, the person who name will go down in history as the creator of the task or the document or whatever. And that means something that helps them connect to this SOP and make sure it stays up to date in a way that might not happen if you the leader, expert, manager was doing these things before they even came on. This is no longer something that's being inflicted upon them, it's something that is being birthed from them. Birthed? Is that a word? I guess it is. Now, I could go on and on about the benefits of this approach, but I think I've already gone on for far longer than the YouTube algorithm the YouTube overlords would like to have me go on. So I'm going to wrap it up with this. If you'd like to learn more about this topic of optimizing your SOPs for systemizing your operations, check out the description. We've got so many good things tucked down there. Do not skip it. Do not miss it. Go check out the links we have waiting for you down there. And if you want to see more videos about this topic, if you want to learn more about systems and process goodness like and subscribe down below, drop a comment and let me know. And if you want to find out more stuff like this directly on YouTube, watch the playlist that we have linked right here. Thank you guys so much for taking the time to watch this video. And until next time, enjoy the process and good luck on the hiring journey as well.