Without the right plan, staff training can be a costly, confusing and inconsistent undertaking. Even after the time-intensive process of hiring an employee, training them is a completely new challenge. Ensuring that they sign all the requisite forms, know what they need to know at the end of their first week or first month, and can start generating value in their position is nearly impossible if you’re going back to the drawing board each and every time.
That’s why Brainlink created Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) Culture. SOPs are our way (and they can be yours, as well) to document any and every process your staff undertakes on a daily basis. SOPs can help with big picture tasks like creating a proactive budget for your client, or every day, seemingly simple tasks, such as setting up a desktop computer. By documenting every minute detail of your business, you develop a culture of SOPs that will minimize your time and money invested in a given action, and maximize the quality and profit.
Tired of expensive staff training that yields no lasting results? Reach out to Brainlink today by calling us at 917-685-7731 or emailing us at raj@brainlink.com to find out how to change your staff training for the better.
How Do You Use Sop Culture To Improve Staff Training?
While building SOP Culture may be a somewhat slow and time-intensive process, keep in mind that the longer you stick with it, the better results you’ll get. The more you work at developing SOP Culture, the less time it will take, and the more benefits you’ll see, including:
- Creating SOPs is a one-time cost to you. Reusing them on daily, weekly, monthly basis will make your staff more productive.
- Training manuals lower your hiring costs and training costs.
- SOPs help you reduce client stress. No longer will you get complaints that staff members are making the same mistakes over and over again.
The purpose of this SOP-based training is to ensure that each member of the team knows everything they need to know. This means they won’t be asking unnecessary questions, Googling nonsense, or taking risks. However, this training won’t make them overnight experts; it’s only meant to expand their horizons and give them a larger map of the IT world so that they have an understanding of VMware, Exchange, Cyberoam and every other tool we use.
The key steps to building effective SOP Culture in your business are:
- Begin by writing three SOP’s. The first one is for your new employees, something like, “How do you configure Outlook on a smartphone for email?” This SOP could include anywhere from 5-20 steps, but the length doesn’t matter. The important part is to start building you SOP Culture from somewhere.
- Next, have your current staff develop an SOP that will be used in the training process for a new employee (i.e. setting up a work desktop). When the new employee starts, have them perform the task using that SOP. By having them use themselves as a guinea pig, they’re incentivized to do it right, as well as find any missing steps in the SOP they’re using.
- Next, have your team create the SOP’s on how to set up a desktop for your favorite client; this is the start of your client-specific SOP’s. Whereas one client will only need one SOP for setting up a desktop anywhere in their business, others may require a number of unique desktop SOP’s based on the different positions, uses, and specialized software they may have.
- Finally, make sure you have SOPs for your wrap-up processes. This is the testing, double-checking, and other final steps that need to be done before a new desktop is given to the client.
Why Should You License The SOP Library?
As shown above, SOP Culture can do wonders for your staff training. We’ve seen the results ourselves: The entire Brainlink staff, from level 1 to level 3, has gone through the same training and in the same time frame.
Interested the licensing? Current pricing is available at http://www.sopculture.com/pricing/
There is a one-time fee for one-time setup, which includes:
- Setup of your Confluence server (on your equipment or ours)
- Three years of run book plugins
- Three years of semi-annual upgrades to your library
- Access to future SOPs (we are increasing licensing rates every quarter)
- The means to build your own SOP culture!
- Customizable Runbook cover page (for your company name and logo)
- SOP Template
- Runbook creation technology
To see what SOP Culture can do for your staff training processes, get in touch with the Brainlink team today by calling us at 917-685-7731 or emailing us at raj@brainlink.com.