Documentation, Event, Employee Onboarding

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88 Min Read

Unlocking Business Efficiency: The Power of Process Documentation and Onboarding on the Find My Catalyst Podcast

Thank you to Mike Simmons for inviting me on the Find My Catalyst podcast to discuss process documentation and business efficiency, including overcoming the resistance to documenting, preventing overcomplicating processes, and the benefits of a strong employee onboarding. 

Mike is a Speaker, Advisor, Coach, Fractional CRO/Sales Leader, and Enabler who helps leaders create clarity & focus, enabling them and their teams to achieve results. He also runs the Phoneix Club / Catalyst Leader Lab community. Mike and I met through our Pavilion LinkedIn engagement group and we noticed we talk about a lot of similar topics!

He did an excellent job wrangling my rambling into insights and takeaways during the show and in the show notes. 

The show covers these topics (which link down to that section of the blog):

Listen to the podcast below, or keep reading!

 

 

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Why is documentation not talked about a lot?

I think because documentation is not super exciting or innovative. Documentation is not marketed like solutions where you click a button, and your problem's going to be magically solved, like how all the software companies promote their tools. Everyone likes to talk about tech and tools when success is actually influenced by discipline and routine and setting up systems that aren't just tools. It's not super glamorous, but it's important work.

Why do you wish you had more resources [like your classes] when you were in previous roles?

I was doing a lot of work building processes and programs from scratch, which was weird because it was like 2020 or 2019... I thought I shouldn't have to build anything from scratch because there should be resources online that tell me best practices for pretty much everything in business by this point in history. So it was very strange to only find maybe a bit of customer-facing documentation information online, and not many process documentation practices. I really want to help prevent people from having to build things from scratch, learn from scratch, or learn from trial and error because it just takes so long to 'recreate the wheel.'

Mike's experience with companies doing or not doing documentation

Mike said when he was a kid, he was a big fan of the A-Team, and one of Hannibal's quotes was, 'There's always a plan,' or 'I love it when a plan comes together.' Mike would reshape it and say, 'I love a good process, there always is a process, and I love it when a process comes together.' 
 
Mike's experience is that some people will say that they're not process-oriented or that there's no process, but ultimately, they do operate in a process. They've just allowed it to happen; the process is happening around them. If they documented they would realize there are a certain set of results, and there might be even some things in the process that they don't need to do anymore. He discussed the process of finding his car keys, where he leaves them in the same place each time, so he doesn't waste time and worry about finding them in a hurry. 
 

Documentation's role in creativity and innovation

Mike said people don't like to talk about process because it is not sexy, it's not interesting, and people may think it gets in the way of creativity. If you actually follow a process, you can be even more creative and more innovative.

I usually advise people to start documentation with processes that are repeated and are not super creative because documenting information frees up your brain for creating new things. If you are following the list of instructions for processes you've already created, you're done with the initial creative creating part. You're working on improving the process, but you don't have to use as much creativity brain power to re-create or remember how to do that process each time. That reserves your creative thinking power for things that actually need it, such as new processes and problem-solving.

Fear of overcomplicating the process 

Mike said one of the other things he sees is a fear of process for the sake of process or a fear of adding too many steps in the process, overcomplicating work. 
 
I think people say they are afraid of these two things more often than these issues actually happen. Over-complicating can be avoided if people get peer input about their processes in every stage of writing. Write a first draft, then ask someone if they can understand this; ask if there are too many steps.
 
Then keep thinking about a process as evolving, which doesn't always mean adding to it. As Mike mentioned earlier, you could find improvements related to taking steps out of the process, you could find efficiencies IF you write it down. But if you don't write the process down, how do you know what could be taken out, what can be added, or what doesn't need to be added that would overcomplicate it?

And remember, what you might think of as overcomplicated, someone else might see as necessary, so make sure you're writing with the user of the documentation in mind.

Fear in writing things down and sharing documentation, and leadership buy-in

One reason people fear writing work down is the creativity part we discussed. People are afraid it's going to take away all their autonomy, creativity, and ability to make decisions on their own.
 
Another reason is it just takes time to write things down. People may not realize that making mistakes each time or doing things differently each time actually takes more time over the long run compared to the time spent documenting the process to follow.
 
One other reason is they might be afraid that they're not an expert, that they're just the ones doing the process right now, and maybe they didn't create the process. They don't feel like they own it enough to write it down and start improving it.
 
Mike added another reason related to how he and his wife (another Jen!) write notes differently, and/or these differences or methods make it difficult to sort, find, and share them with each other, especially non-digital notes like Post-its.
 
Mike talked about how there are so many opportunities to digitize this information so that you don't have to write it down over and over again.
 
He also said that if it's not written down and shared, it gets lost, you move on to the next thing, everyone think that we taked about the subject before and wonders why nothing changed. The reason nothing changed is they didn't assign it to somebody, that person didn't take ownership, it wasn't clear what they were going to do next, and they didn't hold everybody accountable for moving those things forward. Sometimes the accountability piece is not that the person didn't care about it, it's because we created a system that got in the way of them being able to do it. We've poured more work onto them that was a higher priority. So documenting on paper instead of putting it in a digital collaborative environment can be an issue with not doing useful or shareable documentation.
 
And the issue about putting too much work on someone's plate to be able to document, or prioritizing other work over documentation, is 'just crap leadership,' Mike said. I agree that leadership not supporting documentation is another blocker that people run into when leadership wants people to work on something that's easily associated with revenue or billable hours. It's difficult to tie documentation directly to revenue, though you can tie it to efficiency and improvements, which then can be tied to profitability.

How do you improve your habit of documentation?

Starting small is always my first piece of advice. Starting documentation with a process you do weekly or more often. It's helpful if it's repeated often so you can get in the habit of reviewing it, improving it, and clarifying it.
 
Also, choose a small task that's not super important so you're not putting a lot of pressure on yourself. What not to do is try to document your entire sales process for your first piece of documentation ever because that is too complicated, and it's going to be too much pressure on yourself.

How do you get feedback and maintain and improve processes and documentation?

Mike asked about that reflective process and feedback loops where we're evaluating documentation. How do you create space for reflecting and assessing the viability of the process, the accuracy of the process, the changes in the process, and the ways to optimize?
 
Hopefully people are using a project management system, then you can assign someone a task to review this piece of documentation you're working on, to get their feedback and also make them aware it exists. You could assign tasks for quarterly reviews of categories of documentation and recurring tasks for reviewing the processes because it probably has changed. Ideally, you're updating it in real-time, but there are probably things you may not have caught in real-time. This time can also make some space to think about how it could be improved if you can't think about that while deep into completing the process.
 
Another thing that helps with feedback is having a communication channel related to documentation and processes, such as a Slack channel. Maybe think of a fun name for it so people don't tune it out. Don't call the channel 'documentation' because people will not pay attention to that. Give it a more interesting name. Then, in that channel, people can share a new piece of documentation and ask people to review it and send input or questions. Also, use that channel to show what's changed in the company because of documentation, improvements to work, or to the culture, such as work-life balance.
 
Mike talked about how sharing like this will start to attract more people, and it won't feel like we're documenting for the sake of documenting.

Fear of judgment prevents documenting 

Mike and I discussed that some people just aren't comfortable documenting. They're not comfortable typing; they're not comfortable putting their work into a space where it can be judged by other people in a public forum. So don't judge your people on their writing skills or typos in the first draft, for example, because that judgment will get in the way of success and prevent building that habit of documenting.
 
I would also say if talking or recording a video is easier than writing, start with that format and use a transcription; and get help editing the written part; you don't have to create every format and every part of the documentation yourself. It's useful to have multiple formats in your documentation, such as video, but that doesn't mean you have to be a master of every media type. Something is better than nothing, and involve others to help you!

podcast documentation onboarding jen bergren mike simmons 2
How can documentation impact employee onboarding?

It can create a feeling of self-service and empowerment when people can find answers on their own. They don't have to wait for an answer, they can go find the documentation
 
The company I worked for was remote and asynchronous so we had people in all time zones. If there was documentation that answered your question, you didn't have to wait up to 24 hours for the next person to sign on to Slack and answer your question. The documentation could likely point you in the right direction on how to do something or what the next step should be.
 
Documentation also solves a lot of mysteries for people coming into a new place and wondering how this company works. Instead of trying to drink from the fire hose from everyone's verbal answers at every meeting, they can know the topic is documented, and they can go back and refer to it later.
 
Ideally, there are different formats of documenting or delivering the onboarding learning, so you can reinforce learning in different ways. Maybe you have a call about a topic, and then you can send the new hire documentation afterward, or you can send it to them before the call, and then they can just come to the call with their questions.

Common mistakes in onboarding programs

A common mistake is not having any onboarding or only having employee onboarding about how to use the day-to-day software. That's important for day one, but what's more important overall is learning about who your team members are, how your role fits into the company, how your work impacts other people... There are so many other things that people need to learn to feel welcome, to feel confident, and to be productive in their role faster instead of trying to figure it out all on their own.
 
Also, for the people at the company who are doing the onboarding of other people, like the managers who are supposed to be doing the onboarding, they're going to receive a lot fewer questions if they put in this time upfront to create more of an onboarding process that answers the common or past questions. So then they're not answering the same question over and over every time someone is onboarded.
 
Mike asked for a ballpark percentage of how many companies have a documented onboarding process. I guessed 20% because a lot of the bigger companies have a documented process, but whether it's up to date or not, whether it's a good process, I'm not sure of.
 
Mike said that might be a generous percentage and how when there is no process, people come into the organization and don't even know where to go to look for the answers to their questions, and then the company is not getting feedback. He said it becomes a really cool way for you to differentiate yourself in your market if you create a good experience for people as you bring them on. Documenting that onboarding process, revisiting that onboarding process, and testing for effectiveness of the onboarding process. If you want to retain employees that you spent a lot of time hiring, this is a great place to look that has a direct impact on revenue, and a direct impact on your business success.
 

The need for a human touch and a communication culture in employee onboarding

Speaking of a past onboarding experience, Mike talked about how some past experiences felt more mechanical, like he was a widget that was getting pushed through a system, not a person.

I've seen that as a complaint as well in some of the research I've been doing. People think the onboarding process is too cold, it's not human enough, if they only get automated emails and recorded lessons.

 
I think you need the human touch at least once a day, some kind of human interaction with their team, or with the onboarding manager, or with their manager.
 
The human touch is especially important since a lot of companies are remote, and it's still sort of a new thing for many companies, though less new in 2024 compared to 2020 when many companies had to make a fast shift to remote. However, remote onboarding could be hard for people because they feel isolated. It's different than being in an office where you're at least surrounded by people talking and visibly working. Even if the people aren't talking to you, you hear things going on in an office.
 
If you have a good Slack culture, you can kind of recreate that. You can see what's going on in the company, what people are talking about. But a lot of companies don't have that, they rely on a lot of private messages and one-on-one calls, and you can't really see what's happening, or what you should be doing, and what other people are doing. Not like in a spying way, but just like what you would overhear in person in the office.
 
Mike talked about the culture of the organization, culture as how we do what we do and how we communicate inside the organization, such as what those in-person meetings that happen on a certain day of the month, or a team meeting that happens a certain day of the week. When somebody comes into the company as a new hire, they have no idea what they're walking into. It's like being dropped into a country where you don't know the language. Clarity around communication and how we do what we do is really important.
 
Building that culture of transparent communication is part of a good onboarding, it's part of documentation. Information is easily available and findable for people to see how everything works and how things fit together. It's having open Slack channels so people can find answers themselves or ask questions to the right people. That's all super important for a good culture.
 
Mike talked about how some processes are organic, and some of them are by design. Culture also gets created either by design, organically, or a combination of both. If you know how to guide culture properly based on a direction that you're moving toward, imagine what can happen as you bring on the right people in your business, and retain those people, by creating a really good onboarding and working experience that aligns with what they went through in the hiring process. If things work well and they're consistent, then they're likely referring you as a good organization to work for. It's a critical function of how businesses are operating. Mike also doesn't believe that organizations aren't doing this well because either they're not documenting it or they're not revisiting those processes.
 

Prioritizing relationship-building in onboarding

Another mistake is not having time built in for the new person to meet the team individually. For my previous company, which was 1o-25 people, we had the new hire meet with every person in the company during onboarding, in one-on-one meetings. If you're a bigger company you probably can't do that, but you can set meetings with their direct team and a few other people that they might work with.
 
Another key point to that is making sure those people who already work at the company have their calendars easily available for scheduling, or you pre-schedule that meeting time for the new hire so the more tenured employee doesn't keep rescheduling. Everyone is busy but it's really important to get the new people feeling belonging and knowing their team.
 
Mike talked about how people are busy, and if onboarding is not a priority in your business, this relationship-building time will get deprioritized, so making sure that people defend and hold that time sacred is really important.

Everboarding, ongoing training 

Mike mentioned the growing popularity of the term 'everboarding,' having this onboarding piece never really end, like a constant PowerUp system.
 
I've been seeing people talk about it, though I haven't been seeing it actually happen. But I like that it's being talked about and bringing in that ongoing learning and development piece. It's good to see more attention on that because if you're just hearing information once during onboarding, you're not going to remember it forever. Don't expect people to remember things if they don't hear them several times. Often, some of the cultural pieces of onboarding would be good to revisit at least yearly.
 
I was thinking about that in my last role, like a re-onboarding training. I like the term everboarding better because that can refer to the time set aside every month for some sort of education. Maybe the education is partly about the company and partly about other things relevant to their role.
 
Mike asked about the frequency of that type of ongoing training, and I think it depends on the topic, the size of the company, and how much training and information they've already built and documented to easily serve to the team.
 
For example, maybe the mission, vision, and values topic is revisited once a year, but maybe that quarterly review of processes is part of the everboarding because maybe you get that time set aside to learn about better ways to do things. Or maybe when reviewing something that was documented,a new person hasn't been involved in it before, so you have to go talk to another team. The time would go towards building those relationships.
 
Mike talked about it being a touch point around performance review time or relationship reviews with clients that take place on a quarterly basis or a semiannual basis, depending on the type of customer size or customer complexity. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations will do it right at renewal time rather than doing it on a quarterly basis or on a semiannual basis, and then ultimately, it just turns into a 'how do we make sure we keep you' conversation rather than 'How do we help you improve.'
 
Mike said maybe this is one of those things to incorporate into your business if employee engagement is
important to you, and if employee retention is important to you. Decide the right frequency to do these activities both from an individual perspective, a team perspective, and maybe even an entire organization perspective.
 
I like the idea of tying it into performance reviews as well as having performance reviews (or whatever nicer word you want to use for them) more often than yearly, because who's going to remember an entire year's worth of work? Nobody. Managers aren't going to remember, and you're not going to remember unless, of course, you're documenting as you're going. That would be a good thing to tie into reviewing processes, reviewing how your company goals fit into your goals, for example, or how the processes you work on fit into the overall business.

Operations people asking better questions

Mike asked who are the people inside an organization who think about processes naturally.
 
I would say operations people, but the tricky thing is a lot of operations people don't have operations
titles, so trying to give you some job title examples is difficult.
 
There are people who have operations mindsets who are always thinking about processes, efficiencies, and improvements and how everything works together and fits together.
 
Some of the things that indicate that they are process-oriented or system-driven would include someone who's always asking questions. Questions about what have we tried before, has anyone tried to improve this, who is in charge, who can I ask questions about this... they probably don't use the word process but specific task questions and suggestions about 'have you tried doing it this way?' could be a first indicator that someone might have an operations mindset.
 
Also, people asking or taking action about how work can be made repeatable or consistent is an indicator of process-orientation.
 
Mike mentioned that I focused on the 'what' and the 'how' questions and not the 'why do we do this?' or 'why is that in there?' questions because sometimes people get defensive with 'why' questions. They're wondering if you are questioning whether or not they can do their job or worried you're going to change their job or take their work away from them.
 
I wouldn't say operations people are taking work away from people (in a bad way like causing layoffs) but making work better or more efficient, so then people have less work overall because of efficiencies. Less work means less stress.
 
Operations people just want to understand how everything fits together in the business, so that's maybe why they're asking the 'why' questions, but the advice I would give to that is to add context to your 'why' question. Try to get to the question behind the question, which is usually more like a 'what' or 'how' question, as you mentioned, that sounds a little less defensive. Then you might not get the answer of 'because I was told to do it this way ' or 'because we've always done it this way.' 
 
Even if 'why' is the root question, by phrasing it in a different way and adding more context, you can get the information that you're looking for from that person.
 
Many of the operations roles Mike's seen are more focused on the 'how do I help, how do I enable, how do I improve' not 'how do I direct people to do things.' And asking questions can often be about 'how do I learn' which can get misunderstood.
 
Sometimes, I'm misunderstood because I ask a lot of questions, and the view is I'm asking the questions because I'm judging the way people are performing today. When really, I'm trying to get better at understanding what people are doing, how they're doing it, and how they fit together so that things can improve and we get more efficient. Then we can actually do more of the work we want to do, and less of the work that's getting in the the way of more enjoyable work.
 
Words like 'learning' are good to add to your questions for more context and to avoid defensiveness so people don't misinterpret the reason why you're asking questions.
 

Recognizing the importance of operations and operations people

 

Mike and I talked about elevating the operations role inside organizations.
 
A lot of it goes back to basic foundations of project management, communication, managing up, leadership, and learning about how a business operates. Those are all important things to know so people don't get stuck in the weeds of just doing their tasks every day, fixing things, which can be a lot of operations roles. A lot of ops people have many fires to put out when numerous people send them requests about something that is broken and needs fixing today.
 
Seeing the bigger picture of how their role can help the business strategically in bigger ways than just fixing individual tools is one example.
 
Mike talked about business acumen and how you simplify it by asking questions about what we do, how we do it, how we make money, who we serve, and so on. If you ask those questions across all functions inside the business, you will gain a perspective of how people think, feel, and then, ultimately, what they start doing relative to the business. Those simple questions we talked about earlier. If we understand those questions, then we can get a better sense of how we make money, who we serve, why people stay with us, and then where everybody starts to fit into it. 
 
Mike said he wondered why we don't give enough credit to operations. I think a lot of it is because part of the job is trying to make things as smooth as possible. You might not like drawing attention to yourself to talk about the success of operations work, which is something we talked about in the bootcamp I helped make for HubSpot. We talk about how operations can communicate your success so people recognize it instead of just trying to stay behind the curtain in the background making everything run.
 
Mike said if you've got operators inside your business who are really focused on helping the work get done, keeping the trains moving on time, making sure the right people are on the right trains, and making sure the right luggage is on the right trains, then recognize them, thank them, and highlight how important they are to the business. A lot of times, they don't want to promote themselves and raise their hand and say, 'Hey, I did this.' Find ways to recognize them because they're out there, and they're the ones who will help make your business work much better.
 
I would say that recognition is also going to prevent burnout from people doing all this work behind the scenes but not getting recognized. They might start feeling resentful they're doing all this work helping the company run and no one realizes that they're doing this work. So then they burn out and leave.
 
Recognize these people so they stay at your company and continue to do that good work of keeping the trains running and layer in some of those things that we've talked about as far as different touch points like different meetings where you maybe have some information that you can share around how some key performance indicators have changed because of a change in process. Or how we've seen some improvement inside that process. Recognize those things both in internal meetings, team meetings, and broader organization meetings because people want to hear about it. Even though they may not want to be brought up on stage to be recognized, it's still good to hear it out loud.
 
Mike added that you should recognize them in the way that they want to be recognized.

RevOps Bootcamp

The bootcamp I just mentioned is run through HubSpot Academy. It's called RevOps bootcamp. It covers the foundations of how to be successful in a RevOps role. We talk about the basics of RevOps to try to get everyone on the same page, which is a whole other topic that I'm writing a book about because everyone is not on the same page.
 
We talk about process mapping, which is documentation and communication. We talk about creating a road map and communicating that road map, communicating your success, and then we have a hiring and skills lesson. Everyone in a company should know and do most of those things, but these topics can be overlooked in RevOps or not prioritized in the individual roles because of all the requests that they get from so many different departments. They're just putting on fires all the time so they might not be able to focus on these topics without guidance.
 
So we really wanted to focus on that in the bootcamp, similar to the other topics I talk about in my own classes with documentation and employee onboarding. Topics that really aren't taught in other places. Information that you might pick up along the way on the job in some random order throughout your career but it's never set out in a curriculum type of order. 
 
 I'm glad there are more classes on operations topics like these popping up, it's great to see.

Documentation and employee onboarding classes

I also have my own documentation classes that started out as a live four-session class. Then I made a recorded class after improving the process and improving the live course.
 
Now it's offered on marketingops.com and a live version will also be offered there soon.
 
I'm excited about creating an employee onboarding course in the live format that is really popular because it gives people accountability for actually doing the learning and showing up. They are not just learning from me but learning from peers because there's always time built into these classes for doing some of the work in the guided exercise templates I give them and time for discussing it with each other and discussing it with me. So it's not just something they could see in a video.
 
Now I'm just gathering research about like what would be helpful for people in a class to learn about related to employee onboarding (contribute here).

 

 

 

 

Thanks again to Mike Simmons for having me on the Find My Catalyst podcast!

Topics:   Documentation, Event, Employee Onboarding