Training for Small Teams | Should you use LMS, Wiki, or other Low-Cost Methods?
A guide to training small teams without expensive software. The speaker compares LMS platforms, wikis, and process templates, explaining what works for small businesses and what doesn't.
If you're running a small team, you know that you need to train that small team. But because you're small, finding capacity, finding time and space and energy to train is not as easy as it sounds. I mean, it's a lot of work to train people. There's a reason that bigger companies have whole departments dedicated to just that. But you're not them, are you? You're a small business owner, you're a small team. Maybe you're even a solopreneur with some subcontractors. And you're just trying to make it so you have enough structure so your people aren't totally floundering and reinventing the wheel every time. So how do you do that? In this video, I'm going to talk through four different categories of support you can provide in a small team context to help onboard your employees. They're not full training departments. They're not thousands of dollars of software. It's just simple solutions that if you set them up, and you set them up intentionally, will help you fast track the training process as a small team who wants to keep things simple. So without further ado, let's, let's dive in. Number one, the number one way you can start training your team is an lms. And this is probably the most, most recommended tool when you start looking at things or you're googling about training. An LMS is a learning management software. Think of an online course. It's a structured environment where you're going through courses or classes or lessons on a given topic. This can be either desktop or something that's built as a phone app, or maybe even both, depending on the tools you're using. This might include things like Moodle, this might include things like Talon LMS or ED App. All of these are designed to help you build structured learning environments for your employees. The benefits of this kind of model is it does give you that very formal curriculum, just like you would have in say, an online course that you could be taking from anywhere. Because the mobile ones especially are very adaptable. You're able to take them from anywhere. So, so your employees can take them on lunch breaks. They don't require an instructor. They can be taken at any time of the day. And get that information into your people's heads. I shouldn't say that they get the information in front of your people's eyeballs, but not necessarily in front of people's heads. I would say that's one of the greatest disadvantages. Here's our segue of these LMS tools. They're online courses. And if you've ever bought an online course, you know the greatest difficulty with online courses is actually completely completing them. So even if you require your employees to go through that online course, you might find that people aren't retaining the information as well as they would in a more formal instructor led in person training. While it's less costly than having people all come in for a bootcamp for a week, that online course might not get as much information actually sticking in their head as you might. A more interactive approach. So what else is there? The other solution I would recommend, which is works differently than the LMS tool is a wiki. So whereas the LMS is a curriculum, you go in, you're enrolled, you go through this, that this and the other, you have to go into set order. Most of the time a wiki or an internal search is more of your own private Google. When you have a question, you as the employee, you Google it in this wiki. It's just like Wikipedia, you search it there and articles that you, the employer have made show up in that wiki. So this might be a tool like Help Scout for example. You go in there, you search, you find articles and instructions about how to do things in your business. Whereas an LMS is kind of preventative, it's teaching people things before they really need to know it. The wiki is answering people in times of need, they have a question about something, they search it, there's the answer. Because they're searching things when they need it, they're more likely to retain the information. However, because it's kind of a break fix approach. You're not proactively teaching people the things that they need to know like you would in an lms. Nonetheless, the wiki could be a really good way for you to have a searchable just hub for all information. I gave the example of Help Scout here that's kind of purpose built for this kind of thing. Any kind of knowledge based tool is purpose built for this kind of thing. But you can also look at just a really long Google Doc or a ClickUp doc and just have any place where people can type in a search and and find information about different things in your business all in one place. I think the centralization is the main feature of the wiki. As long as you can search it and it's all together, then you're good. So that's approach number two again has pros, has cons, but nonetheless it's there. Both of these tools are very affordable, I would say they generally you have to pay for them in some way, but they're very affordable. They take a lot of time to set up but, but they're there and they can live and breathe and continue to grow with you. The problem with both of them, whether it's the break fix or the, you know, the library approach, is that they are kind of out of the way. So if someone's your employee and they're working, you know, they're here in Adobe Illustrator and they're trying to figure out something they have to remember, oh, I need to go to the wiki to find this information, or oh, I need to go back to the online course to find this information. It's actually out of their normal zone that they're working in. And I think that's a main disadvantage when you're trying to get someone to start learning. It's hard to do it if they don't want to and it's inconvenient. One of the solutions that I think is pretty this is the third or fourth alternative, depending on how you're counting. And also the easiest alternative is process templates. Now I have a bunch of videos about this, but I'm just going to give you the TLDR here. Process templates are the idea of using a task management system, a place where you can keep to do's for your whole team, and creating templates in that system for commonly done tasks. Following me. So for example, you might have a task that says create a post in the Facebook group to welcome new Facebook group members. Rather than just have that as a task with just a title and nothing else and assign it to Susan. You could instead have a task template that says the same title, but gives the step by step checklist in the body of it of how to do that. When you have that task template set up and you assign it to a person, that person not only is told what they need to do, but they're given all of the resources and context in the same moment in the same place to do that task. Where this gets fascinating is it avoids the need to look in two places, especially with ClickUp, if that's what tool you're using or something else. Which, when you're able to keep all that context, your walkthroughs, your knowledge all in the same place. It makes it very easy for someone to actually follow the process because it's right there in front of them. It would almost be inconvenient to not look at the process because it's right there in their face, prompting them with the checkboxes they need to check. So that is the final and I think sometimes the best way to approach onboarding and training in your company. Have it sprinkled throughout every single task that you do. Rather than a big old chunk that only happens at the beginning or a library that you only access if you remember to look at it. Instead, have the process be everywhere. Every time something needs to be done, the process is right there next to it. Because you're using templates, because you're using checklists, because you've got everything already documented. The process is every single place it needs to be and and not unlike the wiki, not centralized to be just in one place. It's decentralized, but all in sync. So that way you can access any piece of the process at any point in time. I hope I didn't lose you there, but that's what I'm trying to get at when it comes to process templates. The final and I think the most convenient method for doing process work in small teams it is this why this is so helpful is because process templating is usually built into every task management tool, just about every so ClickUp for example, and again, I have my affiliate link down in the bottom here, so if you're interested in it, check it out. I highly, highly recommend a tool like that, or Wrike or Asana or Monday, any of those task tools and start using the templates. You don't have to buy a fancy software. Your people do not have to remember another login or go to a different place. Instead, it's all right there in the place where you're actually doing the work. So that's it for this video about the different ways that you can train and onboard in a small company. None of them involve complex solutions or big expenses. Most of these you could start for, you know, $5 or one day of work today, just spend the day finishing it. And it would be set up so it doesn't have to be complicated, it just has to be effective. So that's it for this video. If you'd like to learn more about training, process documentation, workflows and software for small businesses, definitely subscribe to my channel. All the work I do is from the lens of a small business who's trying to take the best of the big business world and bring it over into the small and beautiful and innovative and nimble world of small business. So if that sounds like something you'd like, be sure to subscribe. Otherwise, I will see you in the next video.
