Episode Summary

While many entrepreneurs can accept the idea of needing team members in order to grow and scale their businesses, most are leery about the onboarding process. In this episode of “Make Space for More,” Melissa Swink dives deep into how to onboard and cross-train team members effectively. 

Melissa first addresses the anxiety and overwhelm that many entrepreneurs feel when it comes to onboarding and training, and then shares her best practices. She also discusses her team's tools to manage their virtual team members and emphasizes the importance of cross-training. Listen now to become equipped and empowered to onboard virtual team members!

Key Highlights:

• Onboarding and cross-training team members can be overwhelming, but it is essential for business growth.
• Having the right documentation, such as independent contractor agreements and non-disclosure agreements, is important when working with new team members.
• Providing the necessary tools and access, such as shared drives and software logins, is crucial for team members to perform their tasks effectively.
• Conducting a team orientation and regular check-ins with team members help ensure clarity and open communication.
• Using project management tools, communication platforms, and time-tracking software can streamline team management and collaboration.
• Cross-training team members by creating standard operating procedures and using tools like Loom can save time and facilitate task handoff.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space For More podcast, where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and today we are going to continue our conversation about step number four of the Make Space For More framework, which is building a team, and in particularly, onboarding and cross -training team members. So before I dive into this topic, I just want to ask you a question.

Does the mere idea of onboarding and cross -training a new team member fill you with anxiety and overwhelm? If the answer is yes, I can tell you that you are not alone. I know that building a team was extremely overwhelming to me, and so I resisted doing it for so many years. And I can tell you that nearly 60 % of our potential clients at my virtual assistant services company have indicated,

during initial conversations that onboarding and training holds them back from building a team. So today I wanna break this down and make this more approachable and digestible so it's not something that continues to hold you back because I can tell you that since growing and that since building a team, I have been able to grow and scale my company beyond what I ever thought possible and I am really excited about.

the opportunities that are available to us in the future because we have such a great team in place and we have the overall structure in place in order to continue growing and scaling the company certainly beyond me or even the way that we even the team that we have right now in place. We are well positioned to continue to grow. So before I dive in, I just want to recap the make space for more framework steps that we've already taken.

and then share with you my best practices for onboarding new team members. So in episode five, we talked about redesigning your role as the CEO of your company. This included getting really clear on what are the most important things that you need to be spending your time on, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. And then we also took a look at here are all the things that are on your plate right now and what are we going to do about those things that aren't necessarily.

bringing in new revenue or the things that you enjoy most or that you are the most gifted and talented in doing. In episode number six, we talked about decluttering things that are no longer aligned in your company. So this might look like products or services that you're just no longer excited about or maybe you find that...

They are very tedious to deliver or create. Maybe they're just not profitable. Maybe there are particular clients or team members that just are no longer a fit for where you're ultimately headed as a company. Or maybe there are groups that you've been a part of and they're just not the right fit for you anymore. Just taking a look at what are some things that we just need to step away from so that we can create the space to grow and scale our companies. And step number seven.

we talked about simplifying and automating some of the repeatable processes in our businesses. And we cover this first before we talk about team because no matter who is doing manual work, we don't wanna be spending any unnecessary time, energy as possible in our repeatable processes in our business because it's just not good use of that time or your money, whether it be you doing those tasks or paying someone else to do those tasks.

we want them to be as efficient as possible. And that's why we talk about that before we dive into building a team. So once we covered those key areas, we dove into building a team. So in episode eight, we talked about what type of return on investment you might be able to expect from hiring team members, and also started to brainstorm what do we hire first based on our needs and what we need to take off of our plate. In episode nine,

we covered best practices for hiring a team. Where do we find good people? How do we have conversations that help us understand how we might be able to work with this person or this company, depending on what you're hiring for? So in today's episode, I'm going to be sharing my best practices for onboarding new team members. And ultimately, our goal is to give them the information and tools that they need in order to succeed in a way that is least in time.

that also is least time consuming for you. We want them to be successful and give them those tools, but we also don't want you spending hours and hours and hours of time every week with your already full schedule. That is not the way that we wanna handle this. All of that being said, before we dive in, just wanna remind you, I am not an HR professional, I'm not an attorney, and so these are some of the tools and tips and tricks and tactics that have worked for me with growing my virtual assistant team.

But I also want to encourage you to have conversations with legal professionals or even accountants just to make sure that you have the right things in place based on your business, your industry, and the area that you live in. Okay. So all that being said, the first thing that I want to share with you is when offering a job or beginning to work with a new independent contractor or

begin working with a new company, make sure that you have the right documentation in place. Some examples of this documentation might be independent contractor agreements or working agreements, non -disclosure agreements, depending on your industry. If you're working on some highly sensitive data and information, an NDA might be really, really important. Maybe if you're hiring employees and that's the way that you're growing your company,

I am not an expert in this area. I know what I personally collect and require from my team members. However, this may vary for you based on, again, the type of business you have, your industry, and certainly where you live. There may be specific things to follow. I would clearly indicate, ultimately, the goal here is to clearly indicate the terms and expectations of your work together.

So for me and my team, some of the things that we outline are expectations of responsiveness to emails, whether they be internal or external that come in. We just really detail in our working agreement some of those expectations so that there's clarity on both sides. That's what we're looking for here. We just wanna make sure that everybody has an understanding of the rules of engagement, if you will. So the second thing,

that I do when onboarding team members is I make sure that I have the right tools in place in order to work with this person. Now, I'm also going to share with you that I am focusing this conversation on hiring and onboarding individuals. This may be different if you're onboarding a company. So for example, I actually most recently hired a company to help me launch this podcast.

Shout out to the team at Amplify U. You guys have done an amazing job. I highly recommend them. But in this case, I hired a company. So they had their own working agreement. They had their own contract. They had their own pricing agreement and all of that. And I hired them. So we used ultimately their paperwork. I am sharing with you some of the things that I do when I am hiring team members to work with my team on a regular ongoing basis. So I just wanted to preface that.

But I think contracts are very important no matter what type of work you're hiring for and kind of who's initiating or who is going to be managing these tasks and projects that are ultimately being done. So with that being said, when I prepare to bring on new team members, I also make sure that I have the proper shared drives and files in place. So our team uses Google Workspace, which includes our email, our calendars,

and also our team share drive. So that's where client files are located. That is where some internal company files are saved and located as well. I want to make sure that I am setting up access to everything that they need, but not necessarily things that they don't need, if that makes sense. So just wanted to share that with you. Going along with that, access and permissions, especially when we're looking at software. So for example,

we use a project management tool called Asana. Many of you may be familiar with it. It's very popular. It's like monday .com is another one. But for example, I need to make sure that I create logins for my team members who need it in the various systems that we use. And I'll cover some more tools that we use to manage a virtual team later on in this episode. But I'm making sure that they have access and I'm setting up.

users, I'm adding them as users, I'm creating the right access that they're going to need in order to do the tasks and projects that I need them to do, making sure that they have the appropriate permissions. Also, when I am onboarding a team member, I outline our preferred methods and timelines for communication. Again, this is important, especially if somebody is remote. What is the expectation in terms of response time?

What is the expectation for communicating between calls or meetings? Is it, are you using Slack? Are you using, are you primarily using email? Are you using maybe Microsoft Teams? What are those methods of communication that is easiest for you and your team? One example that we use on the team is Voxer. It's a voice messaging app, if you're not familiar with it.

And sometimes that just saves a lot on emailing back and forth. I can send my team a quick voice memo and say, hey guys, I just sent you an email about this, wanted to give you some background information, you know, that sort of thing. It saves a lot of time and cuts down on meetings, just to give you an example. So making sure that we're clear on what are expectations and methods of communication. Also, some of the things that I am doing to prepare bringing on a new team member,

is creating, is sharing logins in a secure way. So maybe there are things that they're going to need access to that for some reason or whatever reason, it just doesn't make sense for me to either create a login for them on their own. Maybe it's something that they are needing access to because it's work that we're doing for a client, for example. We use a system called LastPass. There's also other...

There's also other login credential storage systems out there like OnePassword is another one. I think Dashlane is another one, just to give you some examples. But I am also inviting them to our LastPass team so that I'm able to securely share logins. And just without getting into the technical side of things, what that does is we can securely store.

not only company logins, usernames and passwords, also client usernames and passwords in a way that does not reveal that information to the team member. So there is basically a browser extension that automatically fills in that information without the team member seeing what that information is. That just helps keep that sensitive information private, if you will.

So these are some of the things that we're doing in order to bring in a new team member to work with us. And the third thing is that we have our team members go through an orientation. So I want to share a little story with you here. I work with a business coach and I was sharing with her that, you know, we were starting to really build a team. We were onboarding a lot of people every month and I felt like I was having the same conversations over and over and over.

And so I had decided, because I love to over complicate things, and I know many of you probably do too, I thought that I needed to create a course, an online course for incoming team members. I'm gonna record all this information one time, and then every new team member who's coming on will go through that information, and I don't have to repeat myself. Great plan, right? But then my business coach said to me,

I don't think you need to really create a course for this. I think that you can either leverage documents that exist already or maybe create some frequently asked questions documents, record some videos, some training videos or some introductory videos of you again going through these things one time. But then why not just create a spreadsheet template where we have check boxes to indicate.

the person has viewed that information, and then a link to that information, where is that video stored, where is that document stored, and then any notes or questions that they had on it when they were reviewing it. You guys, that was so much easier than me thinking that I needed to build a course. So then of course, if I was to build a formal course, I would have to look for software, and then we'd have to set it up.

This was so much easier, so much faster. In fact, other team members were able to help create some of these training videos. I didn't even have to do it all myself. Some people were willing to help with giving an overview of how our project management system is organized. Some were willing to create video overviews of here's how our shared drive is organized. Here's how we organize a client's file, for example, things like that. It was so much easier just to have these things in one place.

and then be able to make copies of that spreadsheet checklist for each new team member coming in. So again, some of the things that we include on our team orientation are maybe documents that they need to read, like frequently asked questions, for example, maybe some brief software trainings in terms of this is how we use this system at Melissa Swink and Co. It's not a general overview on how they use this software.

Most software companies have those types of trainings available should somebody need them. So this was very tailored to us. Also just indicating where to find different pieces of information within our filing system, et cetera. Once we have a team member go through all those steps, we have a live onboarding call where we can go through any specific questions that they had on the trainings. But then we're also setting up opportunities for team members to shadow others on calls.

So maybe this is a virtual assistant coming in. We're gonna have them shadow other virtual assistant calls with their clients just so they can see how they are working successfully with their clients. What kinds of questions are they asking during checking calls and things like that? It's just helpful to sit in and there's always so much to be learned by shadowing other people. We are also meeting with our team members regularly.

So maybe every week in the beginning and then at least once a month having a one -on -one either with me or one of the senior BAs on our team, but we make sure that we're communicating with them regularly and having open conversations. What's going well for you right now? What are you still unsure about or what's something that is unclear or maybe something that's frustrating to you? What do you want more of in your work with our company?

What do you want less of? Do you have some ideas for how we can work together more efficiently? Having regular conversations is huge and we have them more frequently in the beginning just to make sure that we are getting our work together up and running successfully. So just to give you some ideas in terms of what our team orientation looks like. Another thing that I wanna share with you are some tools that we use to manage our virtual team.

Depending on the work that you're doing and the type of business that you have, some of these might be beneficial for you as well. So as I mentioned, we use a project management tool called Asana. You may have your own that you're doing, and this just spells out very clearly what are each person's responsibilities. And those are organized maybe by client, maybe those are organized through different...

internal tasks and projects, like maybe it's marketing related, maybe it's operations related or management related, but we have everything organized in a system so that we can clearly see what are the responsibilities assigned to this person, what is the timeline that those need to be completed by, or maybe what are the routines or the repeatable tasks that they're doing on a regular basis. Are they being completed and are they being completed on time?

It's a really easy tool for us to use to get a snapshot of what everybody's doing. Maybe what is their capacity? What do they have on their plate currently? There's a lot of different things that we can do with this system. As I also mentioned, we personally use Google Workspace for our team. I know Microsoft has great solutions as well. There's other ones out there, but having the email and the shared drives and the calendars,

and some communication tools in one spot really help us to be able to communicate effectively. Zoom is another one that we use. I know there's Google Meet as well. There's Microsoft Teams, but this is the way that we're able to meet with our team members on a regular basis, face -to -face in real time. LastPass is another one that I mentioned today. That is the system that we use to store secure logins in a way that we're able to

grant access to what somebody needs access to without giving them the actual login credentials. And then that way we're able to also revoke that access at any given point in time. So if they are no longer working on a particular project or client's account, we can remove them from that folder. Or maybe for some reason things just weren't, we weren't a fit and they did not work with us long -term. We can just revoke any access that they had.

without having to go through the hoops of changing passwords or having that concern that there are secure information that this person has taken with them after they've concluded the work that we were doing together. Another couple of tools that we use sometimes, Dropbox is another one for cloud file sharing. I would say the bulk of what we do is in Google Workspace just because files...

electronic files and sharing is included in that fee that we pay every month, but some clients use Dropbox and we certainly use Dropbox with our clients as well. Lastly, one of the things that we are using in terms of keeping track of time spent with different clients projects or internal projects is Clockify. Our team members are able to either run a timer on their desktop and indicate like, here's what I'm working on.

and hit go and then just automatically tally their time each day. Or maybe they do manual entries like maybe it's one of our bookkeeper team members and they say, you know, reconciled so and so's QuickBooks online transactions for the month of April. And then they put 45 minutes or something like that. That just kind of helps us get a sense of how much time things are taking. Do we need to...

allow for more time? Are we becoming more efficient where things are taking less time? It just gives us a good sense of where things are at in terms of usage and time budgets and things like that. This is not something that I micromanage. It's something that I use to make decisions or answer questions as needed. Okay, lastly, with all of the training and onboarding, I just want to share with you...

leading up to my time off that fall, I spent hours and hours creating a manual of all of the repeatable tasks and things that I was doing for my company and for my clients so that other people could perform them for me during my time off. This was the suggestion of the business coach that I had during that time. And I mean old school Word documents with step number one, log into this system, click here, go there, like T.

And I started saying, well, I need to create a manual of all the things. And she stopped me in my tracks. She said, no, you don't. What you need to do is you need to hire people who know how to do these types of tasks, have them watch you do them, create a standard operating procedure, have them document the steps to do the task as you're explaining it to them and doing the task yourself, have them send that to you so that you can review it.

maybe make any corrections, and then let them take that task over from there. You guys, it was a game changer. And I can tell you that even now when we are cross -training team members or I am offloading more to my executive assistant, I often use a system called Loom, L -O -O I believe that I've shared it on this podcast before. It's not expensive, there's a free version. I think I pay $10 a month for the premium version.

And I create videos of basically me performing tasks on my computer with voiceover so that I'm able to easily send those tasks over to team members to take over. I am also using this to share feedback where maybe my graphic designer has designed some graphics for maybe some promotions that we have coming up. And I would like a few revisions. I will record a screen share video with my feedback for her.

and then she's able to take that and make those revisions and those tweaks to whatever she's created. It saves me so much time, but I want you to remember, hire somebody who does have the skill set that sets them up for success and makes them more likely to hit the ground running and be able to take over these tasks and projects for you, and also find ways to efficiently hand that off where you're not spending hours and hours of your own time.

trying to train somebody from the ground up. You guys, thank you so much for hanging in there with me during this episode. This is the hardest part of building a team, but I hope that I have given you some tools and strategies to demystify this and simplify this and actually help get you excited about the possibility of getting help from a team because I can tell you it is a game changer, not only for the growth of your business, but also your sanity and it drastically reduces the amount of time.

doing manual work in your business. So if you found this information helpful, I highly encourage you to subscribe, follow this podcast so that you can continue receiving strategies every week to make space for more in your business and grow your business beyond you. Thank you so much for joining me and I'll see you in the next episode.