Undoubtedly your company, like almost every company out there nowadays, has some kind of training procedure in place to onboard new employees or upskill your team. That, however, doesn’t mean that your business isn’t experiencing problems with the implementation or outcome of that training. What do you do when management doesn’t have time to support new teammates? How do you make sure roles and responsibilities are clear and understood? How do you manage abrupt changes, like when the chaos of Covid hit? If you’re not currently prepared for some or any of these issues, then that’s why you need an Internal Process Library!
Let me show you what this resource is and how it can solve all of these problems for your organization.
What’s an internal process library?
An Internal Process Library is a single, convenient platform where your company can host all of your internal training resources and documentation. It’s like a digital bible of your organization’s workflow and processes. On this internal platform, you can give detailed instructions to your team on how you want tasks and work to be completed for any position, which can be accessed at any time by anyone. This is a modern way of documenting how things are done, which allows you to delegate, scale, and advance your digital transformation. These Internal Process Libraries save time, money, and better ensure company standards are met.
To get a better understanding of the “big picture” and to see just how useful and powerful these digital libraries can be, I’m going to give you a behind-the-scenes look into the internal library of our Share PLM team. Let’s dive in!
What goes into a process library like this?
We first started documenting our processes near the beginning of this year. We then began designing our internal process library’s structure, which is like a framework for our business. Each of our teammates in different positions were asked to start detailing their main tasks, writing down instructions, recording short videos of the processes, and assembling relevant documents and templates.gning our internal process library’s structure, which is like a framework for our business. Each of our teammates in different positions were asked to start detailing their main tasks, writing down instructions, recording short videos of the processes, and assembling relevant documents and templates.
Next we created a map for the site and developed the layout to organize our training materials. We broke our library down into four main sections with various subsections that are the most important to our company’s workflow and for understanding our procedures.
Core Processes
The first section of our internal library documents all of our core internal processes, which are divided into four subsections: Human Resources, Operations, Sales, and Marketing.
In Human Resources any of our teammates can find detailed instructions on how we recruit new employees, handle vacation time and absences, conduct employee evaluations, complete payroll and invoicing, and other HR activities.
Our Operations section documents how we track and analyze our internal worked hours using our project management tools and other internal technical maintenance tasks.
In Sales we explain how we do outreach, plan and execute sales campaigns and calls, and how we run our in-person strategy workshops.
Lastly in Marketing, we can learn how our social media accounts are managed, how to conduct a webinar, plan a podcast, and manage our email correspondence with our subscribers.
Products and Services
The most important section of our Internal Process Library is about our products and services. These links take the user to sections that explain every step that needs to be taken when creating one of our products or when providing one of our services to a client.
Here every teammate can follow each process step by step to deliver the same high-quality standard of service we give our customers every time.
Take our Strategy Session service for example. In these workshops we help our clients review their current training materials, build a learning program and curriculum, and build a structure for their digital library of resources. When you click on the Strategy Session link in the library, you can see the three phases of the process, how each of the tasks must be completed in each phase, and in what order they should be carried out.
IT Tools
As a fully-remote company that uses a number of cloud applications to manage our daily operations, it was very important for our company to have an IT Tools section. This part of our library provides links to resources and courses we’ve made to teach our team how to use our IT and management tools. It’s crucial that everyone knows how to use our time-tracking tool (Toggl), our project management tool (Asana), our shared cloud drive, video editor, and elearning tools.
Onboarding Curriculum
Our fourth and last section is orchestrated to onboard new employees in our company. We tailored the introductory course specifically to the needs of new workmates so they can begin their job fast and efficiently. Everyone on the SharePLM team goes through our onboarding curriculum – even I did – and thanks to such an incredibly useful training tool, the process only takes a new employee a few days to be prepared for their position.
The onboarding course introduces them to our team members, teaches them how to get registered and start using our tools, informs them of our standards, and even gives them an exercise for each of our main processes so they can practice our internal workflow before they start.
Why do you need an internal process library?
From the description alone that I just gave, I’m sure your mind is racing through all the possible benefits a resource like this could do for your company. With one of these digital libraries, you no longer need a designated person to train your employees. Also, doing training face-to-face or in a classroom setting is a thing of the past. Just like that, you’ve freed up countless hours of management’s time.
You need a Internal Process Library so that your company doesn’t miss a beat if an employee suddenly has an accident or falls ill, goes on maternity/paternity leave, or if you have to quickly shift to fully-remote operations, as we saw with Covid. This resource allows you to train a new replacement or delegate the work across your team immediately and remotely.
There’s no confusion of who is responsible for what or how you expect things to be done when your whole team can access any of your tasks or processes at any time. Your onboarding course will get them up to speed from the beginning, but if they need a refresher in the future, they have access to it to review and answer their questions. Also, since it’s all digital, it’s easy to tweek minor changes and scale it as needed.
Who can benefit from an internal process library?
So as you can see, an Internal Process Library is a powerful resource that would be invaluable for any company to have. It definitely makes an incredible difference in our remote education-technology company since our team is scattered across multiple cities in two different countries.
These digital training tools would also be perfect for system integrators, consulting companies, software vendors, international organizations, and anyone else looking to save time and money and advance their company’s digital transformation.
It takes some time to develop but your organization can only benefit from clearly defining its processes, reestablishing its goals, clarifying its standards, and fine-tuning its workflow. If your company is ready to reap all the benefits an Internal Process Library can bring them, schedule a call with us today! We’ll get your digital library up and running in no time.
Thanks for reading!
