How much could you grow your business if you weren’t busy hand-holding your employees?

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If you have employees, you already know that one of the most costly, time-consuming aspects of owning a business is managing your people. So many hours spent – just making sure employees and contractors are functioning as they should.

And what about ramping up new hires? Pretty involving, to say the least. All that time spent showing and telling, and they still might not stick around – let alone follow procedures correctly.

There are many experts out there with some sage advice, but I personally love the insights that come directly from helping literally thousands of owners of all types and sizes of business with these questions that come up time and time again. Here are a few of the most common (see if you relate):

1.) How do I make sure my people are always crystal-clear on what I want them to do?

2.) How can I ensure they will absolutely follow procedures when I’m not there?

3.) How can I attract and retain the best talent, rather than taking the “revolving door” out to some other opportunity?

Each of these issues can be addressed with great effectiveness using a growing resource of leading companies who know that when it comes to hiring and managing your staff, the key is found in training. This is not a one-time event either. Practice plus practice plus more practice creates real habits that make the marks in creating top performers you can rely on. You see everywhere now the advancements in online training sites, essentially an “online university” where your people can earn a “Masters Degree” in running your business with excellence.

Think about these key ingredients when building your very own training environment:

• Videos from the founder explaining the origins and history of the company.
• Core standards presented in your philosophy, ethics, and values.
• Policies and Procedures that are imperative to running your business.
• Any additional presentations, reports and white papers, audios, and even demonstrations that your employees can learn every aspect of their job from.

An effective “online university” must also include tests for employees to take, proving they have retained the material, with scores automatically reported to management to ensure compliance. Your team can not only directly manage to this system but also directly assess their staff’s skills and abilities.

Building your own online university may sound like a daunting task, but by taking one piece at a time, it can actually be accomplished rather quickly. Just the act of collecting these items into one repository is a true asset to any company poised for growth.

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So, it all sounds good, you say. Now, how do I build my own online university? Glad you asked!

Step 1.) Assess

The very first step is to inventory what you have already in place. Gather any help-wanted ads you’ve been using, any training documents, any videos, manuals, reports, etc. – anything that is already in use for hiring or managing your staff – put it all in front of you. Now, begin to think of how it could be better. What’s missing? How should this be organized?

Step 2.) Document

Next, map-out what you really want your hiring and managing process to be. Make the existing one better by adding, deleting or refining as necessary. This will require a very clear step-by-step outline to be drawn up, along with clear delegation of tasks involved.

Step 3.) Virtualize!

Finally, digitize everything that hasn’t been already. Scan, re-type or create – whatever is necessary to put it all in electronic form. Now – upload these documents into the intra-net platform you have chosen. Obviously, for this step, you’ll need to have researched some good intra-net platforms. The one we use allows secure log-in access at five levels so everyone from management, HR, accounting, all the way down to new hires can access what they need, and only what they need to do their job.

Exercise #1: If you have employees right now: Estimate the number of wasted hours due to staff looking for things they need to do their job. The U.S. national average is 150 hours per staff member per year. Now take those 150 hours lost, estimate the cost to your company. Now take that number and multiply by number of staff. Finally, divide that number by 260 (the number of business days per year).

That is the amazing amount of money wasted each day that you do not have a world-class training site for your staff. With a world-class training site, production should go up an estimated 4X. Now what would that mean to your bottom line?

Exercise #2: If you need to hire some rock star talent: How much revenue could you create for your business if you added one person and got them up to full speed faster generating 25% more revenue than you are today? If you are using virtual systems to hire and manage that person, it should take no more than 3-4 hours of your time per week. Do the math on one new hire. Now utilizing that same virtualized system, hire three more.

With each again doing 25% more in revenue generation, what’s the math on that? Now, imagine each of the four doing better than that, producing say, 50% of what you are, and you are still only spending a total of 3-5 hours per week managing.

Now you should know if a virtual training environment is right for you. Next issue please!

By Rosina Fischer, Founder and President of the Take it Virtual! division of Chet Holmes International

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