The 3 Best Online Training Tools for Your Staff

  • Home
  • /
  • Blog
  • /
  • The 3 Best Online Training Tools for Your Staff

Want to give your staff the best training possible, but don't have the time or money to do it in person?

Check out these three online training tools that will help you create an effective and efficient training program for your team. As a business owner, you know that investing in your staff is essential to your long-term success. But with the demands of day-to-day operations, it can be difficult to find the time and resources to provide comprehensive training for your team. Fortunately, there are now a number of online training tools that can help you educate your staff without taking them away from their work.

So if you're looking for online training tools for your staff, then this episode is for you. We will discuss the three best online training tools that are perfect for your staff! With these 3 powerful online training tools, you'll be able to provide high-quality training for your employees without taking them away from their work.

Listen to the Episode

Read the Full Transcript

Atiba de Souza: So you started hiring staff and now you need to get them trained and you're creating policies and procedures, and you're trying to figure out what's the best way to store all of this? Where do I keep all of this information and make it accessible to them? Well, that's what we're gonna be talking about today on the Build Your Team Show.

Hey everybody! Welcome to the Build Your Team Show. I am your host, Atiba. And today we're gonna be talking about maintaining your staff training guide. Now, let me just be clear and blunt upfront. If you've been here for a while and you've listened to my other videos, then you know, a staff training guide, a staff manual, any of those types of things, I rail against those terms.

Why? Because people do what with employee handbooks. Maybe they read them on day one and then never see them again. And so they don't really, really get used and it's almost a cultural thing. Okay? Let's just be honest. It's a cultural thing. We all know that there's the employee handbook, especially if you're working in person, there's the employee handbook and the binder and the HR Department which really just means depending on the size of your company on a shelf somewhere that no one looks at. 

So what's the point? What's the point? And if you're hiring virtually and you're training staff, then you're like, "Okay. Well, I can't put my employee handbook on a shelf for sure. And so, where do I put this training guide? This training manual? Where do I put it?" 

Well, first of, I want to do a little bit of a vocabulary shift from training guide, training manual employee handbook, into talking about SOPs. Standard operating procedures — SOPs. SOPs are what we need to transition to in thought away from terms like training guide and training manual.

Because what an SOP is going to do for you is an SOP is going to take a particular process, a particular task in your company and say, "Hey! This is who's responsible for this task. This is why this task is important, and these are the steps that you can take to do this task." 

That my friends is where we need to get to and get away from training guides and training manuals that people only use once and go to SOPs, which are things that people will pick up or use every time and integrate into the process of how they get their jobs done.

The other beauty of SOPs is simply this, when a task is complete and there is an outcome, and the outcome does not meet your expectation. You can go back and say, "Number one. Did you follow the SOP?" That's a bullying question. Yes or no. Right? If the answer is no. Well, we know what the problem is. If the answer is yes, then we can say, "Fantastic. Let's pull up the SOP and let's start going back through it and figure out where we went wrong." 

Here's why that's so key and crucial. Let me give you a little bit of a statistic here. They say something like 95% workplace failures are due to poor processes, not poor people. So often as owners, as managers, as the boss, when something goes wrong, we point the finger at the person and we blame the person.

But oftentimes it's not the person, it's the process. And if we fix the process, the person will do better. SOPs allow us to do that, and they allow us to do it in a very, very nonjudgmental objective way because sometimes it is. It's the way they interpreted the process, and so now we realize we need to be clearer with the process and the steps so that we can get the outcome we were looking for.

Now, that's why SOPs are important. That's why we're switching away from training guides and training manuals, those big bulky things that have dust on them, right? Or massive Google docs that take forever to open that you can't find anything in. And we're gonna ask the question, what's the best place? What's the best way to store this information that's in SOPs?

Now, we've actually tried three different ways so far. We've tried more than three but three different systems so far. Okay? We first started off in Notion, and Notion was great for a while until the team started to really grow and then we outgrew Notion.

It wasn't bad. Enjoyed our time with Notion, albeit short. And there are ways that you can build structures inside of Notion to house your SOPs. They'll still be in Google Docs and you can just link to the Google Doc and they can open it right there and it's great. We outgrew notion for a bunch of different reasons.

The next thing that we went to was ClickUp and we started using ClickUp docs and putting all of our SOPs inside of ClickUp Docs. And that actually worked well for a while. And we even still use it for some things, in some ways inside of ClickUp. It was okay. The thing that I didn't like about ClickUp though, it wasn't very searchable.

It wasn't very easy to always find this stuff because when you're searching inside a ClickUp, you're searching and you're searching everything that's in there, and we do all of our project management in ClickUp. So if you wanted to search the term email management inside of our ClickUp, you would find so much stuff and only one of 'em would be the SOP on email management, and that just was not appropriate for us.

So here's where we are now. I'm gonna introduce you to something new. And that is get Guru or just Guru. I guess is what it's called. But the website is getguru.com and we're gonna have it linked down below for you as well. And let me see, I'm gonna pull this up here so that you guys can see it. So this is their website and they say here, organized company information and access it anywhere.

And that's really what it is. It is like a company wiki. And so it's not just for SOPs, really store any type of information that you want to share and make searchable in your company.

So absolutely wonderful. Let's dive in really quickly and we're gonna look at the pricing, 'cause I love their pricing, especially if you're still new and you still have a small team. Look at that. They've got a free tier, guys. They have a free tier for up to three users. So if you're a really small team, super easy, you can get in here, start managing your SOPs all in one place for free. For free. 

And even if you're bigger and you need to grow a bit, then you can do the $5 per month. Now for us, we only have the users in here that actually create SOPs. Everybody else just gets to share it. So we don't have everybody in. Now you could put everybody in and pay for all of them, but if they're not creating SOPs, it's really no reason in my opinion.

So I only have the few people on my staff who are allowed to create SOPs in the system. Now, I wanna be clear on this. Everyone in our company is responsible for creating their own SOPs for their tasks, their job. Once they've created those SOPs and gone through the process of testing those SOPs, then they send it to one of the managers who has the access to Guru to actually import that data into Guru and manage it here.

Now, I do it that way because I only want certain people having access to be able to update and change the SOPs. Call me a little anal retentive with that, but that's the way I do it. You can do it any other way that you like. But either way, their pricing is super great cuz at five bucks a month per user, man, seriously to know that your processes are right and working well, it is absolutely, absolutely fantastic. 

Now, let's jump into Guru just really quick and I'm gonna jump into mine here. And so you'll see here on my home, I've got a bunch of all of our SOPs listed in here. Now, here's a thing that I love with Guru. So they're called cards, right? Everything outta Guru called a card.

And so we have as all of our SOPs as cards, but if you look here, you'll see it's in the production team folder. This one here is in the content creation team folder. This one is an admin team. So now when we look over on the left hand side, in the left nav over here, you'll see we've created different teams.

And each team has their own set of SOPs, guys. So we can break this out by different areas of our organization and even create folders within the team so that we can then further segment and break out information. This is what I love here, because now we're creating structure and hierarchy to our SOPs.

Then the last thing I'm gonna show you is, you can also just come and search. I searched the word headshot. Boom. Here's the SOP for creating bio and headshots for when we need to do that. There it is. Here it is. So when you're talking about your training guide, your employee manual, and how to store it and maintain it, we have found that Guru after going through Notion, after using ClickUp for a long time, Guru has been the best solution for us and it's because it centralizes everything in one place allows all of those cards, SOPs to be shareable publicly just like a Google doc. You just send a link and people have access to it.

We've even integrated it into our Slack channels where we've pinned for every single team, their major SOPs to that Slack channel so they can always access it. We've even been able to integrate it with ClickUp and ClickUp tasks. So now the Guru cards show up in ClickUp task, guys.

So for us it's been absolutely wonderful. Absolutely genius, and I hope that you can see too, how this would help you with maintaining what you may be calling still your training guide or your staff manual or your employee handbook, how you can maintain your SOPs using this, and how it also starts to permeate into the fabric of your culture because you really want it to.

So that you can have predictable results from every single task, every single area of your organization. All right, everybody. As I said, the link is down below for getguru.com. Go click on that, go check that out. Hey, start off on the free tier and see how you like it. I'm sure you're gonna love it.

But as always, if you've got any questions, drop 'em down below. Want to answer your questions. I'll see you soon. Bye, guys!

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}

FREE

Get My Content Repurposing System

>
Success message!

Warning message!

Error message!