How to Cross Train Your Team Easily

If only one person in your business knows how to do a given process, yet that person is out sick on vacation, gets another job, gets hit by a bus, what happens then?

Oh, my God. Okay, it's happening. Everybody stay calm. What's the procedure? Everyone, what's the procedure? Stay calm.

Yikes. Exactly. So in this video, what I'm breaking down are three steps you can use to essentially build backups in your team. This concept of cross training means that one person knows how to do something, but if they are out, someone, somebody else can step right in and make sure that all hell doesn't break loose just because somebody's out of the office. These three steps are super easy and efficient to implement, but do not skip around this video. You really want to watch the whole thing because one of these steps is so. It's simple, but it's so sneaky that a lot of teams don't do it. My own team here, we didn't do it. And when we skipped this step, we ended up wasting a ton of time. All of our cross training we tried to do did not work because we skipped this step. So do yourself a favor, do not skip around. Watch this quick video. Let's get started. All right, that's looking much better. We're going to start off with step one for cross training. The first step is just going to be defining your recipes. And all I mean by this is basically, how do you do what you do? What are the activities that need to happen that only that person knows? Our goal when we're trying to build processes in a business is to get. Get things out of human heads, because human heads are great for solving problems, but not the best place to store information long term. So if we can, we want to capture some recipes, write them down. So that way, if we want to send an invoice when Susie's not here, or we want to resolve a support ticket when John's not in the office, we have a way to do that because the instructions are available to us. Writing down these instructions are usually done by using some sort of. Sort of standard operating procedure template. All this means is kind of a standard structure for how you organize your recipes. If you ever go to a recipe website, like for cooking and baking, you know, they have like ingredients and steps and then a picture of the beautiful cake at the end. Yeah, that's all we're talking about. Just a default layout. Now I have some videos on the channel here that can help you get a running start on this to write these standard operating procedures pretty quickly. But if you need a little bit more help with this, we actually have some services here at ProcessDriven where we can actually work with you to write some SOPs. So you can find that out in the description below. But anyway, that's your first step. Capture some recipes. This is best done by the person who actually has the knowledge in your organization. So, Susie, if Susie's the only one that knows how to send an invoice, Suzy should be writing this down. If Susie cannot write this down because she has already suddenly left the team, move on to step two. We'll make up for lost time there. Now let's wipe all this away, and let's start with step two of this process, which is when we're gonna personalize these recipes. Essentially, we're gonna, you know, write up the recipe. Let's just imagine this is my recipe right here. Hand it to the new person and say, all right, this is Grandma's recipe for pancakes or Susie's recipe for how to write an invoice. I want you to take this recipe and make it better. I'm giving it to the new person. Okay. In this case, Suzy might be teaching Bob how to send an invoice. We're going to give Bob that instruction. Whether it's in a notebook like that or in our standard operating procedure software or in something else, we're going to give it to Bob, and we're going to follow three steps as frequently as we need to to make it happen. Our goal with giving Bob this recipe is to make him a co author, have him help make this recipe clearer and better as we work on it together. Which reminds me, if you don't have a recipe like in the last step, you're like, my person who has all the knowledge is gone. What do I do? If you don't have a recipe coming into step two here, all you need to do is give Bob some extra work. So the person who's learning their job is not only to write notes of what they learn. If they've got nothing to work off of, their job is to capture the recipe itself. So as somebody else is doing it in step one, the I do part, as someone else is demonstrating this student's, I guess, job is to write down the process for more on this approach to kind of get Bob comfortable. If you are working with a Bob who's trying to figure this out, you can watch this video up here. We go through that strategy, more detail, but the process is the same whether or not you have that rough draft. Now, whether Bob is writing The SOP or just amending the sop. We're going to be going through three phases to make sure that Bob is up to speed on this training experience. We've got three steps we might hop and skip and jump around, depending on how familiar Bob already is. But here are the three basic ones. The first one is I do, meaning I will demonstrate the activity while you watch. The second phase is we do. We're going to do the activity together. Perhaps every so often I'll be asking Bob, hey, Bob, what would we do next? And then just keep journeying through that progression. Third, we're going to do you do. In this case, it would be Bob does. We will let Bob do the activity with varying degrees of us overseeing Bob's activity. Now, if this was a really important live process, something that was in front of clients, client facing really high stakes, I might do each of these steps two to five times. I remember here at ProcessDriven when I first started training coaches to help support our customers for these steps, I probably did a total of 50 repetitions going through this in different forms because coaching was such a challenging skill to teach and learn. But in contrast, if I had a process like copying and pasting information into a client report and it was just copy and paste, that's it. I may go very quickly through these steps. I may just demonstrate it once by giving them the sop. We might never do it together. I might go right to that person doing it by themself and I would just check the end result. How involved you are in these steps and how many times you go through them is going to vary based on how knowledgeable the person is. Do they already kind of know this process or is this brand new? It also depends on the stakes of the process. Is it something really difficult to teach, like I'm an entire coaching methodology, or is it very simple like data entry? The end goal of this process is that the other person is able to execute the process and get as good or better of a result than if you were to do it yourself. So in this case, if we got to any point where Bob was struggling, I was teaching him how to write an invoice. And when I checked the invoice during the you do stage, the invoice looked terrible. It had broken links and so on and so forth. I might move us back to the we do phase and repeat that a few more times. Depending on how Bob in this case is doing, I could break that we do phase down into sub steps. Maybe the first time we do it Together, I'm mostly just saying what we're doing, and he's there for the ride. Maybe the second time I do something and then I ask him, hey, Bob, what would we do next? If I wasn't here, what would we do next? Wait for his answer, and if there's something off, I correct him. And then we move on to the next thing. And I asked Bob again, hey, Bob, what would you do next? What would we type here? How would we do that? And maybe the third time I do the we do section, Bob is the one clicking around and I'm in his ear or on a screen or sitting over his shoulder saying, all right, Bob, what are you doing? I'm just gonna watch. And we're technically still doing it together, but you can see how we're getting more and more and more independent. Your goal is that if you are pulled away or if the person with the knowledge is pulled away, the end result is as good or higher than what you would expect. As we go through each of these phases, Bob is responsible for taking notes at each step. If Bob struggled in the you do stage because he missed a terms and conditions detail, well, Bob is responsible for updating that recipe with a little note to self saying, don't forget future Bob. We need to include this, that, and the other. He needs to clarify that SOP so that he remembers what excellence looks like, particularly if he's a backup person. Which brings me to our next step. The third and final step of this whole experiment is determining how often Bob gets to practice. Yes, a practice schedule. How fancy. All we really want to do here is take whatever the activity is and make sure that Bob or whoever the backup person is, is regularly doing it. There is no better way to guarantee your cross training fails than to cross train somebody. Teach them like we did in step one and two, and then never have them touch the process again until there's an emergency. That's. That's not going to be fun. That's not going to be a good time. In this case with Bob and the invoicing scenario, we might have something like this. We could say, normally Susie sends all invoices every single day, but on the first Friday of the month, Bob sends the invoices. So once a month, he's getting practice. If that feels too frequent, you can also play with that frequency, depending on how much practice you think that person needs. That will be based on the person's learning style and also how particular the process is. So let's just take invoicing again. Maybe Susie does it 100% of the time. But every first Monday of the quarter, Bob does it. So he gets practice four times a year? Sure, why not? And in addition to that, if Susie's ever out of the office, Bob's in charge of invoicing. So we've got a two part practice schedule there, and that's the key piece. First, Bob will get practice if Susie is out. But even if Susie is not out, Bob will get practice once a quarter or once a month, depending on what we have set up. This can be set up really easily inside your task management structure where you would have two separate tasks, one for Susie, one for Bob. And to set this up, you don't need anything fancy, just adjust the recurrence inside your task management system. If you don't already have one, you may want to set one up. And that's something we can help you with to check out the description. Got lots of videos on that. But you basically want to have two recurring tasks. One saying, suzy, send invoices every day except for this day, and you want another one for Bob saying, hey, Bob, on this special day, prepare to send invoices. So we've got these tasks basically keeping us on our practice schedule even if Susie never gets sick. That way, if Susie does get sick suddenly or leaves or whatever, Bob's covered, Bob's trained, Bob's ready to go. And you know, while all of this might feel like a little bit of ridiculous example, Bob and Suzy and all these abstract things, every single business out there has opportunities like this, where there's a Suzy one, Susie, who's the only one that knows how to do a given thing. Usually it's the founder, business owner, if they're still involved. There are so many areas where you being the only brain with information is introducing a ton of risk into your business. If you took the time to follow these steps, define your recipes, get ownership of those recipes, and then make regular practice part of your routine. Imagine how much more resilient and sustainable and maybe even calm your business could be if everything wasn't relying on Susie not getting sick. Because if there's one thing we can guarantee about human beings working in a business, it's that they're gonna not be in that business forever. So let's get ahead of it now. Build out a simple three step cross training plan here and start implementing it on the most important, important processes in your business. In fact, I would love to see all of us wrap up this video with a bit of a commitment, a plan of how we could Apply this teaching right now into our own business by picking one area that could use a little bit more redundancy. One process where things are bottlenecking on one human one spot, or task or function or responsibility, where it's all relying on human duct tape. What is that area for you? Whatever it is, write it down in the comments. And let's make a commitment here. Let's challenge ourselves to apply this cross training plan. What would happen if every area of your business had this kind of redundancy in place? Be pretty freaking cool, right? Yeah. And if you're someone who's struggling with this concept of kind of systemizing your business, you want to get things out of your head, you want to cross train everybody, but you're not even sure what you do, let alone how to cross train everybody on all of it, because it just feels like so much. If that feels like you consider working with here at ProcessDriven, this is what we do for a living. We work with small businesses and startups to help them document their institutional knowledge, the things that they just know but never wrote down. We teach you how to capture all that as well as how to organize that information directly inside a work management system. So all of your tasks, all of your SOPs, your recipes, all of this stuff is all together in one place that anyone on your team, whether they're new to the team or been there for years, can find. So that way, if something goes crazy, if someone leaves, whatever, you're not going to fall apart. You've got everything there. You've got your game plan and you're prepared for anything. If that's something you'd be interested in, check out the link in the description below. This is kind of our main service here and I'd love to work with you as well. But anyway, if you're not in the mood for that, you're like, I'm good. I don't want systemize anything. That's okay to check over here on the side of the screen. You might want to watch this play playlist next where you can start to systemize your business one free video at a time.