146: New? Help Us Welcome the Next You (A Message for Your New Team Members)

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on so stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go Places.

When you're new, you have the freshest eyes. You are the one that even though you feel shy and you might feel like you don't know what you're doing and you have no right to speak up, you are in the best position to document and create more of a path for the person who comes after you. This can include checklists if it doesn't already exist. If they haven't handed you a checklist of here's all the software, all the apps to download for your phone, for your desktop, you can create it. If there are all these different accounts that you needed to set up and there was no checklist about how to set up your email account with this person's domain or how to get delegate access to their email inbox or whatever it is, if there was not a checklist that existed as you were starting, you can be the one to create it.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

One of my secret motivations behind writing the Free Time book was creating one central end all be all manual for business owners to give to new team members that would save them the time of creating it. Speaking of freeing time, of course, if business owners learn things from free time, I'm thrilled. But part of me was wondering, maybe a little bit of imposter syndrome creeping in. Would business owners learn anything if they've already read a bunch of business books like E. Myth Revisited and Traction? Maybe there's nothing new here. The whole Mike Michalowicz oeuvre which is so helpful. I've benefited greatly from those books and I thought, well, if the manager or business owner has already mastered all of these free time principles, then at the very least I want to write in such a fun way that they could give this book to team members and help those team members learn this is how we work, that these principles are timeless, they transcend the company size even. And I really strove to create a guide that again, you could just hand to someone else on your team and say this is how we work. Read this before you start with our company. So just as free time, I sometimes describe As a love letter to fellow heart based business owners, this podcast episode is actually for your new team members. I've just been onboarding someone new to my team and it's reminding me of what is a missing chapter to the book, shall we say, a chapter that later, through many rounds of edits and needing to consolidate, got condensed into just one bullet point. That bullet point is in part three. It's in the last chapter of the book called Save Someone Next Steps. There's an episode on exactly this broader topic that I'll put in the show notes and there's one bullet on the bottom of page 275 that says New Help us welcome the next you. This was its own standalone chapter, but it ended up just a tiny bullet point with a couple sentences. So let me read you what's in the book and then I want to expand on this that if you have new team members joining you, this is what I have said to my new team members and what I would want to say to all of yours too. So the bullet reads New Help us welcome the next you. Look for ways to improve our onboarding documentation as you get up to speed with fresh eyes, you are best equipped to update processes that are out of date and add new FAQs and answers to questions that we didn't previously think to include. What else would the next new person find helpful? So to the new team members, let me start by saying your business owner is overwhelmed. So many business owners there are these rare moments where we hit a clearing and we feel good and we feel organized and we feel on top of things. But so much of the rest of the time we are just struggling to get out of those burdensome bees feeling bored, bottlenecked, burned out or buried by bureaucracy. Your business owner, who you are going to be working with, is likely up to their ears in tasks large and small. They are first and foremost focused on cash flow, bringing in new work to keep the lights on, to keep paying for team members just like you. Whether you're full time or you're part time, doesn't matter if it's just a few hours a week or more, I can guarantee you that they're a little bit nervous at times about being able to support you, to give you the time and energy and attention not just to onboard you into the organization, but to make sure that you have enough work, the right kind of work that aligns with your strengths, that the work is getting done up to their standards of what they need to keep the business going. They have a lot on their mind. And another thing I can all but promise you is I'm guessing that their onboarding documentation is could use a little work. That is where you come in. If you're new. That means you have a front row seat yes to everything that's missing from their onboarding guidelines. Whether it's a checklist for your first day, how to get squared away, your first week, your first month, your first quarter, whatever is missing, you can do this new company that you're gonna be working with again, even if it's super part time, even if it's just five hours a week. One of the best gifts that you can give is to document what's missing and to try to make the onboarding process twice as smooth for the next person who might join after you. So be on the lookout and don't be afraid to write down, keep track of and suggest ways that they can improve the onboarding. What's missing, what was confusing? And then another part of this is to think about if you are going to onboard someone to replace you three months from now, what would they need to know to do your job impeccably? Well, there's a chapter in free time called every question lives. Three lives. And that means that if you're going to ask a question about how to do your role or how to handle aspects of your role, and it doesn't yet exist in a manager manual or documentation, SOPs, standard operating procedures within the business. If there's no centralized hub for how to do things, that's a really big win that you could suggest and help implement. But secondly, if you can't find something in there, it means it's out of date and that should exist. So when we say every question lives three lives, that means that when you ask a question when you can't find something, you need to learn how to do your job or your role, then capture it. Don't let that Q and A live and die in email or on a phone call or in a Slack channel. Get it down, capture it, save it somewhere that future people who are onboarding to the role or to the company can reference. And then if it's customer related, how can you create a canned response. Create an email template. How can you add it to the public facing website or a public facing help center so that even customers are more clear and they don't have to write in and ask if the question that you asked relates to that.

We'll be right back just after this.

When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice Flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite obey your thirst.

So good.

So good.

So good.

New markdowns are on at your Nordstrom Rack store. Save even more. Up to 70% on dresses, tops, boots and handbags to give and get cause.

I always find something amazing. Just so many good brands.

I get an extra 5% off with.

My Nordstrom credit card Total Queen treatment.

Join the Nordy Club at Nordstrom Rack to unlock our best deals. Big gifts, big perks. That's why you rack.

So within this every question lives. Three lives. You heard me mention two big pieces of documentation. Actually three. So there is an onboarding guide to how to get onboarded at the company altogether. Ideally there's a manager manual with how to handle different parts of the business. And then three there's going to be a guide to your role. You can do the business owner or manager that you're working for a huge favor by making sure that every single thing that they share with you is captured. That you take notes on your calls, you synthesize those notes afterward. You are constantly making the internal documentation and materials so smarter. You're creating a guide to your role so that when you're ready to move on or move up within the company or take on different types of work. It's so easy. You can hand off your work in the snap of a fingers in a way that maybe the person who is bringing you in is not yet totally up to speed and prepared to do so, you would be giving someone else an experience and you would be able to much more quickly move out of the role. If you take really diligent notes up front and then keep those notes alive as you shift things. Because maybe they're going to assign certain things to you and you're going to see ways you can make it even better or faster, more efficient, improve the process, automate things again. When you're new, you have the freshest eyes. You are the one that even though you feel shy and you might feel like you don't know what you're doing and you have no right to speak up. You are in the best position to document and create more of a path for the person who comes after you. This can include checklists if it doesn't already exist. If they haven't handed you a checklist of here's all the software, all the apps to download for your phone, for your desktop, you can create it. If there are all these different accounts that you needed to set up and there was no checklist about how to set up your email account with this person's domain or how to get delegate access to their email inbox or whatever it is. If there was not a checklist that existed as you were starting, you can be the one to create it. Starting at any new company can be completely intimidating. And I get it. As the owner, I often feel like I'm trying to convey a beehive in my brain of information. Information that's large and small and some of it's urgent and important, some of it doesn't matter at all. But they're little nuanced details of how we like to do things in our business. It's a lot to grasp and it can feel intimidating starting at a company of any size. I've worked at a startup as the first employee where I was the one that did create the employee welcome kit. You know, I was creating that even then. I was saving someone the next steps by setting that up. I remember starting at Google and not knowing any of the acronyms that they were using for different types of client management and accounts and different Google tools, internal and external, different parts of the company. There were so many departments and. Org names that were abbreviated. I just had no clue. It was like learning a whole nother language. And then now as the business owner, I know how much lives in my head even as I strive to get every single bit of information out of my head and into our centralized notion Operations manual. If you're a business owner and you don't already have this, definitely check out the FreeTime operations dashboard because I've done it for you. If you're a new team member and the company that you're working with doesn't have anything like this, a shared central repository of information about how to do things, you too can suggest it. So go to itsfreetime.com dashboard. Setting something like that up could actually be a way that you make a huge impact relatively early on by helping that business create this, if it doesn't already exist. Creating something that's searchable, customizable, and interlinkable. At the end of the first three months, you might still be getting ramped up to how to do your role. But imagine if you've created this artifact of your onboarding experience that serves as a beautiful guide for the next person, even if you haven't yet achieved really significant metrics for whoever you'll be working with or the company that you're a part of in terms of business results. Because you don't know enough yet about how to do your job, imagine that you have created a really robust onboarding checklist or really robust documentation on your role, how it's evolved over time, what responsibilities you're going to have, the cadence of what you should be thinking about. Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually. There is just so much value that you can add. There's so much that you can create and deliver that is of tremendous value. Let's say you're in a sales position. It's not just about in the first three months, did you make five sales? Did you make even one sale? Did you land one new client? But did you document the way that this company approaches sales? Everything that you've learned, not just never ending meeting notes that are totally unorganized, but synthesizing those notes of what the person ramping you up teaching you has taught you about how this company approaches sales and marketing and what the next person in this role should consider. What resources have you turned to to learn and grow your skills? Include those Create looms of how you're navigating internal resources. I'm not such a fan of looms because I think videos and software interfaces can get really quickly out of date. And I find videos actually pretty cumbersome if it's longer than a minute or two. But if there's something quick that you can demonstrate how someone can do something that would eliminate the need for another team member to explain, that's a great thing. This is the type of stuff to be thinking about. And I know that sometimes it's frustrating. If you're starting a new role, it can feel completely overwhelming and you're probably wondering, why aren't they more organized? Why doesn't this exist yet? What a frustrating onboarding experience. That just means that you have an amazing opportunity to add tremendous value within the first few months of joining. That I will tell you right now as a business owner, the business owner or manager you're working for will be so incredibly thankful. You will immediately add so much value to the business. That will serve as a springboard for doing even more interesting strategic projects as you go. If you're curious what a manager manual looks like or how to set one up and you're not yet interested in the whole full robust FreeTime operations dashboard, I encourage you to check out the FreeTime toolkit. That's completely free and there's templates for all kinds of things that I mention in the book, so you can get access to that by going to itsfreetime.comtoolkit. that's itsfreetime.com toolkit I hope this episode gives you some ideas about how you can immediately become instrumental to whatever team, whatever manager, whatever person that you're going to be working with, and business owners. I hope that this takes some pressure off of you to be totally buttoned up and prepared before you bring someone on to help you in the work that you're doing so that you can free up your time to do even more of your best work. Owners, you hereby have permission not to have everything buttoned up and perfect before bringing someone in. And team members, you have permission to take the reins and own this process whether or not you're being asked to do it. To make it even clearer for the next new person since you being new, have a front row seat to what needs improving. Thanks so much for listening everybody. And again, those two resources I mentioned are the robust done for you FreeTime Dashboard that's@itsfreetime.com.

And the completely free FreeTime Toolkit at itsfreetime.com toolkit.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show, and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful, and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my Tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use, along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time, Even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join Remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun, and build with love.

The Uniswap Wallet makes it easier and safer to own and use Crypto Created by pioneers of the crypto economy, the Uniswap Protocol has powered over $3 trillion in trading volume, and it's trusted by tens of millions worldwide. With the Uniswap wallet, you can discover, swap, and manage your crypto all from your phone. Buy your first crypto assets in just a few taps and start exploring the freedom of decentralized finance. With Uniswap, Tap the banner to get started.