Empowering Your Business: Enhancing Employee Experience through Orientation, Skill Sharing, Backups, and Alignment with a Playbook

Employees are your most valuable asset and arguably the most important liability. They are the backbone and key to any company's success.

The Playbook is a document that covers everything from implementing strategy to enhancing the employee experience, and scaling culture. It is a living document that will grow and change with the company.

4 ways a playbook enhances the employee experience:

1. Onboarding/Orienting

2. Sharing Skills

3. Creating Backups

4. Building in Alignment

What's in your Playbook?

This episode is part 3 in the “Why you need a business playbook?” series. Click for Part 1 and Part 2.

Resource Books:

The Business Playbook

Built to Sell

Ready to learn more about creating a business playbook for your company? Click the button below. 👇🏽

Podcast Transcript:

0:01 Kiva Slade

Hello and welcome to Collab with Kiva. I'm your host Kiva Slade. From the marbled halls of the US Congress to my racing themed office chair. I've learned that there is no perfect path to the life of your dreams. My journey over the past 20 years has included being a legislative director for a member of Congress, policy director for a nonprofit, stay at home mom, homeschooling mom, jewelry biz owner, and now the owner of a service based business. Whether your journey has been a straight line, or full of zigs and zags. Join me and my guest as we share insights hope in lessons learned from our email entrepreneurship journeys. May the collaborative sharing of our stories be the tide that lifts your boat? Let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to collab with Kiva. I am your host, Kiva Slade, and I am super excited. Today we are in part three of our Why do you need a business playbook series? Part One we focused on unburdening yourself as the CEO. In part two, we focused on setting high standards consistently in your business. And today, we're gonna delve into Reason three, which is enhancing the employee experience. That's right, employee II experience. Let's be honest, when you start a business, we are all about getting those customers. And because it is so important for us to acquire customers, we are focused on that customer experience. What's our customer's journey? What does it onboarding our customer look like? What does offboarding our customer look like? We spend a lot of energy towards what the customer needs in meeting those needs. I am not saying that's wrong at all. But I am saying, as your business grows, and you start to hire people, our focus has to shift. We've seen that lead lately with a great resignation. Employee ease are finding their voice, employee ease are having standards in demands that they want met as well. And so how does a business playbook tie in to enhancing this employee experience? Let's break it down four simple ways. The first is orientation, onboarding. Just as we were laser focused on onboarding our customers, we need to have that same focus and intentionality when it comes to onboarding and orienting our team members. No one wants to be on either end of a bad onboarding. If you're on the employee end of it, you're wondering, why am I here? What am I doing? Where's all the information? Where's the access that I need? If you're on the employee or end? Why did I hire this person, they're not able to do X, Y, Z. The reality is in most cases, we really didn't onboard them well. And there's an art to onboarding. And it's going to look different, obviously for every single business. But there are key components that are definitely necessary. In terms of understanding what the company culture is, what the company history is, what are the company's mission, vision and values while you think you might know those before you go in for that position? And once in it really helps to dig deeper into that information? Are we collecting all of the right forms? Are we granting all the right accesses to people when we bring them on board? are we introducing them to the people that they need to meet? Or what steps are we taking to make sure that their orientation onboarding process is smooth and comprehensive?

4:48

So having a playbook shows what's expected of your new team members, and how their careers can grow once again, with a great resignation. We are seeing that that lack of vertical growth has caused some people to want to step away to try something else to go into another field. And no one wants to come into a business where they don't see an opportunity for themselves to continue to grow and contribute. So, orienting slash onboarding, is one way in which you can enhance your employee experience through a business playbook. The second is sharing of skills. When you are talking about career advancement, and your senior people and your more junior ones, are all able to connect, are all able to know who's who in the organization, and are able to have a means of easy communication between those different levels. wondrous things can happen in your business, there's so much wisdom that those in senior positions have, that they can pass to those in junior positions. But also, there's wisdom in some things that junior positions have, that they can pass to seniors. And so it's that transfer of knowledge, that transfer of insights in fostering that through a business playbook creates a wonderful opportunity within your organization in which to have everyone focused on basically up leveling, and this sharing of skills that takes place. Third reason that the employee experience needs enhancing comes with creating backups. When your business is mature enough that you're offering benefits in support, you want to have a plan in place for sick days, parental leave, other times off, that's going to involve cross training. Someone else has to know what needs to be done for various jobs and positions, especially when that primary person takes leave. In some businesses, that causes panic, because you're afraid your business is going to miss a beat. Some employees are feeling panic, because there's a whole lot of work that's about to be dumped on them that they may not have be trained and equipped in which to handle. Let's alleviate the panic for everyone, by actually having the backups in place to actually having those processes detailed out. So if Bob has to take some time off, Jane is able to step right on in and the business doesn't miss a beat. In maybe in some cases, Bob takes time off, Jane and Sam have to step in. But whatever that situation is, there's no need to panic. Bob doesn't feel like I can't take this time off. Because my position, all the work that I do is going to not get done. And I'm going to have to come back to it. As well as the angry stares from my colleagues. And as the owner, you realize, hey, we're good. We have backups in place. Policies are easily accessible. The cross training has taken place. Nothing's going to be missed. Bob will be but the functions of the business will continue to move forward. And that is super important. And so the last reason that a business playbook comes in handy when it's enhancing the employee experience is it built in alignment? And I touched on this briefly because you'll realize there's a benefit when your business and your employees are aligned around vision and core values. And I've found in my experience that vision and core values can sometimes be skipped.

9:50

They're overlooked, and there's kind of a here's our vision statement. But you can tell it wasn't Something where people rolled up their sleeves that really dig deep into what that vision is. The same with core values. And I think, again, the anecdotal evidence is proving that with the great resignation, some people are not feeling aligned with the core values and the vision of the places in which they were employed. They're expressing that misalignment, by moving on out of the way and leaving those positions and leaving those companies having in defining your vision, and your core values, but keeping it to yourself, as the owner doesn't allow for that alignment to take place. The vision and the core values needs to be shared, it needs to be readily accessible to everyone on the team. And when you do that, with a business inside of a business playbook always can be referred right back to you super quickly. And it's a reminder, in case the business starts to lose its way employees can say, you you, let's go back to what we've defined as the vision and core values of who we are. Have these things changed? Do we need to update them? Now that we find ourselves moving in a different direction. And if that's the case, that's fine. But once again, even that update is shared with the team. So the team can make that decision, are we still in alignment? Because alignment is critical.

12:11

No one wants to be in a place in which they are feeling they are not aligned. So creating that playbook really drives home that need for that clarity around vision and core values. In work that I do with clients, we actually start there. I think it's interesting. A lot of times people want to start with our policies. Let's start with filling out my team. Let's start with getting all of the processes together. Whoa, time out. Let's start with mission, vision and core values. And I've yet to work with a client in which there was not refinement need it around mission, vision and core values. Not once. So I encourage you that if you don't have your mission, vision and core values, clearly delineated I want you spend some time we're doing just that. If you need help, feel free to reach out. We can go through that process together. Because it's necessary, it's needed. It's valued. And your team wants to know this information, trust me, they really do. So again, today we were talking about why you need a business playbook. In this case, because this is part three of this series, it's really around enhancing the employee experience. When we started those businesses, there was such a focus on the customer. But as you start to have a team, it's so important that you make that conscious effort to focus in shift your attention to the employee experience. When it comes to retraining, people re hiring like the cost are astronomical. Some statistics say a business can lose anywhere from 18 to $30,000. For retraining a one new hire no one wants to take that hit on their bottom line. And you don't have to, because we're going to focus on making sure that we orient and onboard our new team members. Well, we're creating these business playbooks so that skills can be shared. Backups are created, and alignment is built in.

15:26

So make sure that you again, focus on those four areas. check out previous episode for more information around setting high standards in your business. And in addition to that, the first part of this series, which we focused on unburdening yourself as a CEO, so you want to check out Episode 15, for how to unburden yourself as a CEO in Episode 16, for setting high standards in your business. I am so excited to wrap up this series next week with the fourth part, which is around generating a valuable asset. So make sure you tune in next week for that part as we conclude the series on why you need a business playbook. I look forward to talking to you then. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of collab with Kiva. You know my heart and it wants you to know that you are uniquely made and that your business path is unique to you. I hope that now you have some clear takeaways from this episode that have left you inspired and motivated to keep pressing forward on your unique path. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. And of course, your reviews on Apple are greatly appreciated. If you are a small business owner and you are ready to build out your business playbook, and you're ready to document and delegate what takes place in your business so it can grow beyond you. Make sure you visit me on my website, the 516 collaborative.com and let's schedule a time to talk. I'll see everyone next time. Bye

Meet Kiva Slade - the Founder and CEO of The 516 Collaborative. With a unique background in high-power politics on Capitol Hill and sixteen years as a homeschooling mama, Kiva found her calling in the online business world as a trusted guide for entrepreneurs looking to build the business of their dreams.

Kiva's work began behind the scenes, orchestrating the back end of businesses and managing teams. But her inner data diva couldn't help but notice that small businesses needed help harnessing the power of data for growth. So she and her team set out to uncover and tidy up the data required to enable clients to grow their businesses confidently and easily.