Since the goal of a how-to guide is to allow customers to help themselves, most businesses only think of documentation in terms of how it will impact their customer support.

But your how-to guides and documentation can also communciate a lot about your business.

Whenever I am getting ready to start using a new product or service, I instantly look at the company’s help site. Granted, I develop online documentation software, so I am probably a bit more aware of this than others, but a company’s help/documentation site can tell me a lot about what it will be like to work with them.

Here are three things I know about you if you have a great documentation site:

1. You are organized

I have never seen a disorganized company put together a great documentation site. A great documentation site sends a clear signal about how organized your company is.

A great example of this is the Van Halen Brown M&M’s. Van Halen used to have a rider in their contract that required the promoters to provide a bowl of M&M’s with all of the brown ones removed. A lot of people thought this was just them being divas. But Snopes explains the real reason:

The legendary “no brown M&Ms” contract clause was indeed real, but the purported motivation for it was not. The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen’s contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide an easy way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read (and complied with).

The Brown M&M’s were a signal about how detail oriented the promoters were.

In the same way, your documentation site is a signal about how organized your business is. If you have a great documentation site, there is a good chance that your business is very organized simply because disorganized businesses aren’t able to create and maintain great documentation sites.

2. You care about helping customers

If a company has created a great documentation site, then it clearly cares about helping customers. Creating a documentation site is an investment of time and money. Companies don’t do this unless they really care about making their customers successful.

3. You have time to help your customers

When I see a company that has great documentation, I know that they are going to have time to help me with the areas that aren’t documented.

Inevitably, when I use a product, no matter how good the documentation is, I will reach a point where I want to do something that isn’t documented. If the company has great documentation, then I can be pretty sure that they will have time to really help me.

Why?

Because companies that have great documentation sites don’t spend a bunch of time answering the same questions over and over again. This frees up their resources to deal with “higher level” problems their customers have.

The inverse is not necessarily true

If Companies have poor documentation (or no documentation), it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are disorganized or unhelpful or time constrained. But the fact is I don’t know that they are organized and helpful. Their documentation hasn’t sent a positive signal so I am going to have to use other methods to find out how easy they will be to work with.

If they have great docs, then I don’t need to do quite as much investigation. Their documentation sends a strong signal about the type of company they are.

Unless of course they are delivering their documentation in a Word file. Then I know it’s going to be a rocky relationship.

Photo courtesy of Michael Thom (Flikr account thom.michaelj)

Guest blog post by Andrew Lisa

Salesforce has recently taken major strides to focus on social media as the central focus of customer outreach and customer relations. Social media tools are now integrated into every facet of Salesforce’s customer service platform, which means the next generation of customer service professionals are going to succeed or fail on their social media skills.

Social Media Outreach

Salesforce has dedicated itself to improving its social media outreach recently for a good reason: That’s where the future of customer relations is heading. If someone has a problem with a product, they are now as likely to tweet or post to Facebook for help as they are to call the vendor.

Some of the biggest companies in the world recognize that social media is directly linked to improved customer service. An article recently explained how Coca-Cola used Salesforce to engage with visitors on their Facebook page to get feedback from customers about their new vending machines. Also, Toyota used Salesforce to help link dealers and service providers with drivers of an electric car through social media.

“Listen” to Social Media

With Radian6 by Salesforce, your customer service team has a powerful tool that lets them use social media to monitor conversations happening about your brand instead of waiting for customers to call with issues or problems.

Radian6 can not only identify discussions about your brand that are taking place on social media, but can isolate them and route them to the right person on your team. It’s working for the parent company of Autoglass.

The Belron Case

Belron, the parent of Autoglass, uses Radian6 to monitor social media sites like Twitter to troll for feedback from customers, whether they went online to vent, gripe, or praise.

By casting a wide net over many sites, Radian6 provides Belron’s customer service team with a dashboard that puts everything being said about the brand directly in front of the team – even if it’s misspelled. This allows their customer service reps to engage the customer on the same social media network, answer their questions, listen to their complaints, or take their suggestions without ever asking them to leave the comfort of Twitter.

The Future is Mobile

Salesforce has twice recently strengthened Chatter, a business communications tool that was once for employees to communicate with each other, but is now being harnessed by smart customer service professionals. Its second upgrade provided both mobile and social media access, which customers have shown time after time are the two preferred mediums for communicating with vendors.

Salesforce is the top name in customer relationship management, in part because it excels at finding trends. Salesforce gambled that social media was the future of customer service, and they were right. The best way your customer service team can harness the power of Salesforce is to use it to harness the power of social media.

Photo credits: Flickr users Fivequidexpert, Clive Darra

Andrew Lisa is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles. He writes about customer service and small business, and has profiled many top business leaders including Stephen Wynn.

This year the speakers include Seth Godin, Nate Silver and Arianna Huffington.

Greg and I won’t be talking about software documentation at the conference, or even about systematizing your business. But we will be talking about taking a systematized approach to Lifecycle Marketing using HubSpot.

Lifecycle Marketing is all about delivering the right information at the right time to your leads and subscribers. The information that your leads want changes based on their level of engagement with you and your company.

One of the tools HubSpot customers can use to do this is called Workflows. Greg and I will be showing how to plan and create Workflows that have a clear goal. When your workflows have a clear goal you can focus on moving your leads through the various lifecycle stages as opposed to just sending out a bunch of emails.

If you are attending Inbound 2013 then please come by and be sure to say hello. We are speaking Thursday, August 22nd at 1:15pm.

In a recent blog post on the 4 key challenges nonprofit organizations face when implementing Salesforce, Sam Dorman noted that:

“Even when the technical side is done well, it can still be hard to get staff to actually use the system…in fact, staff adoption shows up as one of the most significant challenges across all types of organizations.”

I’m going to share 3 tips that can help you improve your Salesforce training, and then show you a Salesforce integration that will completely overhaul your training program and boost user adoption—and we’re giving it to nonprofits for a fraction of the normal price.

First, I’ll share the tips:

Tip #1: Designate your power user(s)

When I attended the Salesforce Customer Company Tour in New York City this past June, I asked several Salesforce consultants how they achieve a good level of user adoption. The common answer I got was, “We designate a power user, spend all of our time training him/her, and then rely on him/her to train the organization.”

Blog articles and forum posts seem to confirm that this approach works, and has now become a best practice of human capital change management. If you’ve already done this, awesome. Move on to the next tip.

Tip #2: Document answers to users’ questions

From conversations and interviews that I’ve had, it seems that some nonprofit organizations stop after tip #1. My advice to you is—don’t be like them.

Get your power user to write down answers to questions that he/she gets on a regular basis. Nonprofits experience a good amount of turnover between seasonal swings in volunteers, interns, and employee turnover.

If the power user has to constantly answer the same questions over and over again, it’s just a waste of time and resources. And if you only have a few folks who can answer questions about the use of Salesforce, you’re letting the fate of your operations depend on the availability of a few good (wo)men.

You need to provide your users with something to reference other than your power users. Documentation gives you that leverage.

Writing great answers

When your power user documents answers, encourage him/her to follow these guidelines:

• Document answers to specific questions
• Use a lot of screenshots
• Make your answers short

Most documentation is ignored because writers don’t adhere to these basic guidelines. It’s a little known secret that readers follow the path of least resistance to solving a problem.

If your answers are long, vague descriptions that cover too much ground and don’t have any images, readers won’t put up with it. Make it easy for your users to quickly understand how to solve their problems.

Tip #3: Make the power user’s answers easy to find

Smartphones and Google have made us comfortable with the idea that we can get an answer to a question anywhere, and at lightning speed. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when Salesforce users can’t quickly and easily find an answer to their basic questions, they get frustrated, stop looking, and either don’t use Salesforce or use Salesforce incorrectly.

Make your answers as easy to find as a Google search, and in a convenient location (like right in Salesforce).

If a user has a question about how to run a report, allow them to enter those keywords into a search box. If users trust that they can just type in their question and get an applicable answer as a search result, they are much more likely to search for the training materials.

And don’t make them leave Salesforce to perform a search. Allow them to ask their questions and find the power user’s answers right within the Salesforce screen they are in. If it’s convenient for the user to find an answer, they are much more likely to ask the question.

Training is more than just a day in front of PowerPoint

Training is an ongoing process. If it’s done right, then you can easily bring more people on board without overwhelming your training team. Designating one or more power users, having them document their answers, and making those answers readily available will allow your staff to continue to train everyday, in a way that is convenient for everybody.

A Salesforce integration that will rock your world

Our company has developed a ScreenSteps/Salesforce integration that, in my biased opinion, is simply amazing. It allows anybody in an organization to create step-by-step tutorials that are searchable right within Salesforce so that everybody can find the answers they need, when they need them, where they need them.

Here’s a quick demo of what the integration does:

We have special nonprofit pricing that makes it possible for non-profits to incorporate this integration into Salesforce at a fraction of the normal cost. If you’re interested, just let us know and we’ll send you our special pricing.

Once you’re set up with the ScreenSteps integration, it will take less than 10 minutes to post your first answer to Salesforce. By the end of the week, your staff could be getting dozens of answers to their questions, right within Salesforce.

A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to be on the other side of the MacHeist fence – our app, Clarify, was featured as part of the MacHeist NanoBundle 3. It was our chance to really put to test the support processes we have established over the last couple of years.

MacHeist

For those of you who aren’t familiar, MacHeist runs regular bundles where they sell a collection of software titles at a very reduced price. There were 10 apps in our bundle, and it sold for just under $10.

We obviously get paid a lot less per unit than we normally would, but we get a ton of volume and a lot of exposure.

But with volume and exposure comes support requests. And we had them. Not everything went perfectly with the logistics of the bundle (when do things ever go perfectly?), but because of the support processes we had in place we were able to survive the week just fine.

Here is the play-by-play of the problems that came up and how we responded to them.

Confusion with registration instructions

For all of the bundle purchases, MacHeist generates the registration keys so that vendors don’t ever see the names of people who actually purchase.

Typically, when Clarify is purchased, a registration key is generated and is tied to the name of the customer. If someone is trying to register Clarify and they use the wrong name (i.e. the registration key and name don’t match), then Clarify won’t work.

Since a Clarify registration key is usually tied to a user’s name, the software registration screen in Clarify asks for your Name and Registration Key. Pretty simple – unless the registration key is tied to something other than the name…

At about 10,000 orders in, we discovered that MacHeist was using the customer’s email address to generate the key – not the name. Since our registration screen said to enter their name, folks were getting a “name does not match” message – because what they really needed to enter was their email address.

This discrepancy came to our attention because our support inbox was quickly filling up with complaints about a registration problem. As soon as we were made aware, we sprung into action (that sounds very super-hero-esque doesn’t it?).

1. Solve the root problem

We first fired off an email to MacHeist letting them know of the issue. In a few hours time they had it fixed. That would prevent future customers from having problems, but we still had about 10,000 + people out there that would have registration problems.

2. Deflect questions

Using ScreenSteps Live, we quickly created a knowledge base article explaining the problem and the solution, and put it on our Clarify help site. That way, anyone coming to the Clarify documentation site searching for help on registration would find the article. This would deflect some of our requests, and leave us more time to help the people who contacted us.

3. Respond quickly

We immediately saw that we were going to be answering the same question over and over again, so we set up a macro in Zendesk (our help ticketing system) that explained how to fix the registration problem.

This macro could easily be triggered via a key command in the web app or in the Zendesk iPad app – in fact, I used my iPad to respond to a bunch of requests while I had dinner with my family.

The macros worked great and it meant that most people got a response within minutes of them asking for help.

Other issues

There were other questions that came up from people who had just purchased the bundle or who were checking out Clarify to see if they were interested. We were able to answer most of those by pointing to specific artilces in our help site.

Did we lose our minds?

Actually it wasn’t bad at all. MacHeist sold just under 60,000 bundles. We definitely saw an increase in support requests but we were able to respond to them quickly and still get all of our other, “normal” work done. I think we did a good job of helping our new customers out quickly and effectively.

The flood certainly came, but the ark had already been built so we were able to stay afloat.

What should you do?

If MacHeist ever comes knocking on your door – answer! They were great to work with, and their bundle provided lots of welcomed exposure for Clarify.

Just be aware that when 60,000 users download your software, you’re going to have support requests – it just comes with the territory. So be prepared by having systems in place that allow you to manage the flood.

For some great tips on “building an ark,” check out Greg’s article from 2010 – “Build the Ark Before the Flood”.

Some reviews said that the program crashed all the time. Okay, that’s a problem, but it’s not a huge issue because bug fixes come out all of the time and that matter could quickly be resolved. But then I saw another review that sort of caught my attention – “Beware of any company that has this level of service (none).”

Oh my! Well, one review can be ignored, right? But then I saw another review – “You will never get any support.” And then another… and another.

Well… that did it for me. I don’t really have time to work with an application that doesn’t have any support.

I used to not care

It’s amazing how just a few years ago, I wouldn’t have let this type of review deter me. Since I worked for a large organization, only certain applications were allowed, and they were all supported by internal staff.

I never had to deal with the developers directly for support, so I never even considered the kind of support I would get as part of my purchasing decision. I just never felt the pain of poor developer support (certainly felt the pain of poor IT support, but that’s different).

Even when I worked on personal projects on my home computer, I only dealt with a handful of applications. Any sort of hiccup just doesn’t seem to be a big deal in those situations because I only had to deal with it once or twice a month.

Now I do

I don’t work for a large organization anymore, so I no longer have an IT department that can help me solve problems and work with me to figure out how to do what I want to do. And I now use way more applications and SaaS products than I used to – all of which are somewhat critical for operations.

I realize now more than ever that for every application and SaaS that I work with, I’m at the mercy of their support. So before an app is purchased, I try to get a sense of what kind of support I’m likely to get.

Some questions I ask myself are:

• Is there a forum?
• What kind of documentation is there?
• Do they have a way for me to contact them with a question?
• Do they regularly tweet stuff out? (or have they gone dark?)
• Are customers expected to answer ALL of the customer support questions?

I’ve still purchased products that don’t have ideal support – but I regretted it.

Customer support is a big deal

I’m not alone! More and more people are beginning to value customer support over almost all else. And since the barriers to entry have completely vanished in the software industry, great customer support is becoming a real competitive advantage.

I actually had a discussion with a customer of ours who said that he makes software purchasing decisions based on how well he perceives their customer support will be – and I don’t blame him! I have several applications that I don’t use regularly because frankly, I don’t know how to use them.

And I don’t have the time to figure it out on my own, the patience to search the forums/open up a ticket every time I have a question about how to do something, or tinker around to understand why something isn’t working as expected.

When I purchase a product, I want to be able to get clear answers quickly. I have a job to do, and I need my tools to help me do them. If I can’t figure out what’s going on, then I’m going to find an alternative.

What are you doing to support your customers?

Nobody is perfect when it comes to customer support, and there are always things that can be improved. We are constantly looking for ways that we can better serve our customers so that they get the best experience possible with our products.

We use a combination of customer service (trouble tickets, forums, etc.), live chat, and knowledge base software so that we can offer support in a variety of ways – because each customer is different, and wants to be helped in a way that is convenient to him/her.

So what are you doing to improve your customers’ experience? What tools do you use so that you can answer questions and concerns quickly and effectively, in a way that is convenient to them? If your answer is, “Nothing,” then don’t be surprised when your pool of potential customers completely dries up.

“I’ve already been burned twice – I don’t want to get burned again.”

After some explanation, I learned that on two occasions, key employees had left somewhat hastily – along with them went all of the operational knowledge for doing their job.

Hiring a replacement was almost impossible because nobody knew what the replacement would do – so before anybody could be hired, the individual I was speaking with had to figure it out from scratch… twice.

I often think about the pain points ScreenSteps Live is addressing when it comes to internal documentation. For some, it’s a matter of leveraging resources (typically folks who use VAs and remote teams), for others it’s a matter of being more efficient and not having to sit over somebody’s shoulder pointing through screens.

But until recently, I haven’t really heard anybody articulate that they’d like to create documentation as sort of an insurance policy against employee turnover – a point that is incredibly undervalued, and really deserves more attention. Because the fact is, your team is going to evolve over time and people are going to come and go. If you’re left getting burned each time a key employee leaves, you’re not going to last long.

What would you do if _____ left?

We all like to think that we’re invincible and that everybody else is replaceable – no matter what happens, you’ll get through it and everything will work out.

And to some degree, that’s true – everybody is replaceable. But it usually comes at a cost:

• Lost time in productivity
• Lost opportunities
• Inefficient training costs
• Doing the procedure incorrectly and inconsistently

And I’m sure you can think of some others. So yes, when somebody leaves you will survive and your heart will go on (one song reference deserved another) – but don’t pretend like it’s easy and that it doesn’t cause you some pain.

So ask yourself what would happen if _____ left? Would a key process be a complete mystery? Would you be starting from scratch? Would it cause you some late nights as you tried to figure out what was going on?

Getting burned is okay if it’s infrequent… Wrong!

When you get burned by employees leaving, what you’re left with are a bunch of unknowns – a bunch of questions. And your operations really won’t be humming until these questions are answered.

From customer feedback, I’ve learned that having a knowledge base full of clear documentation is most valued when these two variables exist:

• Questions are high in volume
• Questions are high in frequency

If you are getting a lot of questions all the time, you love being able to send somebody a URL from your knowledge base. A detailed answer that has pictures, descriptions, pointing arrows, and maybe even a screencast is an awesome resource to have on hand – just document it once and reuse it dozens/hundreds of times.

But if you just have a lot of questions every once in a while (high volume, low frequency), then you probably feel comfortable just “putting out the fire” when it happens. You’re okay getting burned because it doesn’t happen that often and there’s plenty of time for the wounds to heal.

This is how a lot of businesses operate – but it’s dangerous. Managers and business owners really ought to throw in a third variable to the list above – Questions that are difficult to answer.

Key personnel leaving, and taking all of their knowledge with them, can leave you with questions that are very difficult to answer, which results in feeling some serious pain.

Don’t wait to get burned

I spoke to several managers the other day at a conference, and learned that most small to medium sized businesses don’t have a plan for training employees who have to fill new roles (either through promotions or turnover) – they just “deal with it.”

If that’s your plan, you’re just waiting to get burned.

Don’t wait for somebody to leave and then try to figure out what they did. Document everything today so that you don’t have to panic when somebody has to permanently leave. Have a plan so that once you find a capable worker, you can just plug them in and they can take over where the other left off.

Putting together a documentation “insurance policy” won’t stop the fires from happening, but they can certainly minimize the damage and the tears that come with turnover.

If you want to see how ScreenSteps Live can help you document your processes, sign up for a free demo and I’ll walk you through the steps of building an internal knowledge base so that you don’t have to get burned next time somebody leaves.

Despite my allergies, I love this time of year because it’s full of hours by the pool, food off the grill, and one or two vacations.

Although… you know what I’ve been noticing the last few years? More often than not, I end up having to do work during my time away from work!

And that’s no good. A vacation is no vacation if I’m accompanied by office tasks and responsibilities everywhere I go!

So even though the trend seems to be leaning more and more to making vacations workactions, I’m not accepting that fate. And frankly, neither should you! To help you take a real vacation this Spring or Summer, I’ve outlined 7 steps that will prepare you to make it happen.

Vacations are good for us!

First off, I just want to emphasize that vacations are good for us! Vacations are times to rejuvenate the mind, refocus your life, spend time with loved ones, and gather zeal and momentum for when you resume your normal duties. If you take your work everywhere you go, you’re going to burn out.

I think that being able to set aside time for vacation is one of the indicators of success in our daily endeavors – it means that you’ve gotten things so under control that you can take a few days off without everything falling apart.

The tricky bit about taking a vacation is figuring out who will handle your responsibilities while you’re away – which really leads to the question, “How do you replace yourself?”

How do you replace yourself for vacation?

Being able to successfully get away for vacation really depends on your ability to make yourself replaceable – and that takes planning. I’ve been in past situations where whoever was leaving on vacation waited until the day before they left to prep me on everything I needed to do while they were away.

Bad idea! If you want me to handle a customer interaction successfully while you’re away, coach me on it a dozen times before you go. If you want me to run a client meeting during your absence, don’t let me run it for the first time during your absence. And if you have a list of things you need me to do, don’t make me figure out how to do it while you’re out of pocket for a week.

If you don’t plan and prep, you’re either going to get questions while you’re away, or come back to a mess that you’ve got to clean up (maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised! But, why leave that to chance?).

So, here’s the plan I’ve concocted to prep you for vacation – hopefully you’ll be replaceable in time for your cruise!

Step 1: List all the things that need to be done

I love lists! You can cross things off them, tear them up, and hand them out to people – here, you’re going to do the latter.

So list what you do on a daily basis, then figure out what will need to be done while you’re away, and what items can wait until you return.

Step 2: Automate what you can

If you can skip the whole delegation thing altogether by making an item on your list automatically happen, do it.

If a newsletter needs to be sent out while you’re away, you can write it up before you go and schedule it to be sent while you’re sleeping in. Or maybe you can trigger certain events to occur using IFTTT. Or maybe you could use TextExpander to save snippets somebody else could use to respond to emails on your behalf (if somebody asks about X, use snippet Y) – that last one is a lesser form of automation, but it still works.

Step 3: Establish a checklist for remaining items

You now have a list of things that need to be done by somebody else while you’re away – for everything on that list, you need to make a checklist for how to accomplish them.

List out everything that needs to be done in order for the task to be accomplished successfully. Your checklists will act somewhat as a control to help the doer know whether he/she covered all the bases – if everything on the checklist is done, then the job will be done. So make sure you don’t leave anything out.

This is also a good time to reevaluate what can be automated and what requires manual inputs – certain checklist items might not even need anybody to manually do them!

Step 4: Write down when to do those activities

Make it clear when the jobs/checklist items need to be done. If it’s a scheduled chore, have whoever is doing it put it on their calendar with an alert going off once or twice. If it’s more of an ad hoc action, make it clear what kind of scenario would trigger a particular activity – you could even indicate the typical activities that come into play each day, and what to do in response (e.g. customers questions, billing invoices etc.).

Step 5: Write instructions for checklist items

Do not make the mistake of handing over a checklist without also providing instructions that show how to do the checklist items. What’s familiar to you is not necessarily familiar to others.

And if you want to reduce the chances of miscommunication, use pictures to show somebody where to go, what to click, and where to type. For ideas on how to create a checklist and write how-to articles, take a look at our webinar, “Documentation to Scale Your Business.”

Step 6: Get somebody to do your work

Now that you have written everything down and have instructions on how to do it all, you just need somebody to do it!

Make sure that whoever is in charge of executing the tasks is well aware of what it takes. Coach them through all your responsibilities, show them where they can get answers to questions that may arise, and let them do each item a few times when you’re around to clear up any ambiguity. This will help prepare them for those days that you will be off, and empower them to act independently and figure something out on their own if necessary.

Let experience breed confidence!

Step 7: Have someone else be in charge

If you can, put somebody in charge of following up with whoever you assigned your responsibilities. Give them the list of items that need doing, along with the checklists, the how-tos, and the due dates. They can check in and perhaps help answer any questions that come up during your absence.

You can also come up with a plan of what to do when there are no answers. Determine what would need to happen in order for you to be bothered. If an “emergency” arises, they should have some guidelines as to what can wait two days until you come back, and what needs your urgent attention.

If you can’t put somebody else in charge of following up, and you absolutely do not want the work to go unchecked, then have whoever is doing your jobs while you’re away send you a daily email with a description of what they were supposed to do, what they were actually able to do, and why there was a discrepancy (if there was one). There’s a great template for this available with our webinar “How to Grow Your Business by Building a Remote Team.”

That will at least minimize the work you have to do to just 5 minutes of reading an email.

Plan right and Relax

Hopefully these 7 steps will help you get away from work and enjoy some time to yourself, with family, or with friends. What you’ll find is that with some preparation, you are in fact replaceable for at least a week.

You may also realize that others are very capable of handling things, and there are very few situations that require your immediate attention. And that’s because good delegation allows others to grow, and allows you the option to move on to other things… like a game of golf.

Leave a comment and tell me what you do to prepare for an uninterrupted vacation.

In my last article, I showed you how to get started with oDesk (one of many great websites for out-tasking). So now that you have your account, I’m going to help you start out-tasking and/or outsourcing your work.

Today’s article is going to show you 5 steps that will help you filter through your tasks and identify which activities need to be done by you, and which activities you can start delegating to somebody else.

Step 1 – Write down your tasks

I know, I know – everything I recommend in my blog articles starts off with “write down your tasks.” But the fact is, if you don’t write them down you’ll never have a handle on what you do. And if you don’t know what you do, good luck trying to get somebody else to do it for you!

Just take 2 minutes and write down 10 things that you’re responsible for doing.

Step 2 – Determine which are core and which are mechanic

Last week, during a Live Q&A Session, Pete Williams suggested adding some additional columns to the list of tasks – one of the columns was writing down whether the task is core, or whether it deals with mechanics.

I thought it was brilliant, and wanted to share it with you!

This is a great way to easily see what you can start handing off to somebody else (mechanics), and what you probably need to spend more time doing (core).

What’s a core task?

A core task is something that only you can do.

Maybe it’s focusing on writing code. Maybe it’s focusing on building partnerships. Whatever it is, this is the thing that you need to be spending the majority of your time doing.

What are mechanics?

Mechanics are the tasks that can be done by somebody besides you.

These kinds of tasks might include writing content, creating graphics, creating a web page, doing the bookkeeping, scheduling calls, customer support, creating a slide deck, data entry, etc. These are things that you should spend little to no time doing.

Breaking up a task

At first, you might be tempted to say that everything on your list is a core activity, and only you can do it. That’s fine, but I’m willing to bet that you can break down those tasks into mini-tasks that are made up of core components and mechanics.

For example, let’s take hosting a webinar – certainly a task that you might consider to be something that only you can do. But let’s break it down into smaller, bite-size chunks (task #4).

The only core thing about a webinar is the content of the webinar (and you actually doing the webinar)! Just about everything else could be done by another person.

Being able to take apart a process and break it down so that you only focus on the core is crucial if you want to successfully grow your business – otherwise, you’ll spend all of your time doing mechanics. And that’s a waste of your time.

Find the Core in all your tasks

In the images above, it looks like I have a lot of core tasks – but in reality, I could go through each one and identify core elements and mechanic elements.

For example, making a website is not core. I might think it’s core because I want it to be my message throughout, but making a website is a lot more than just writing copy.

So what I would do is similar to what I did with the webinar – identify mini-tasks and determine what is core and what is mechanic. Writing copy might be core, but designing the content management system, making the graphics, coming up with the site structure, etc. are all mechanics that somebody else could do – I can have input, but I don’t need to be the one doing all the work.

The same could be said for support calls, live chats, writing blog posts, etc. Each of those jobs have core elements, and mechanic elements. If I want to successfully grow my business, then I need to really refine my processes so that I only do the core and I outsource/out-task all the mechanics.

Step 3 – Which tasks are repeatable?

After discussing core versus mechanics during the Q&A session, Pete explained the need to identify tasks that are one-off chores, and tasks that are repeatable (i.e. tasks that occur everyday, every week, or every month).

If the tasks are repeatable, then that means you could outsource it. If it’s a one-off task, then you’ll just want to out-task it.

Outsource repeatable tasks

For mechanic tasks that are repeatable, you will want to eventually start outsourcing them to another team member. You don’t want to spend your time always doing tasks that aren’t related to your core activities.

If you don’t have a team member to outsource the task to, then you might begin to consider hiring somebody, or getting a virtual assistant – this is covered a little bit more in Step 4.

Out-task one time tasks

If you have a huge task list, but it’s full of one-off tasks, then you don’t want to hire somebody full-time because after a month or two you’ll run out of things for them to do!

This is when you’ll want to go oDesk or Elance and find some temporary help for a reasonable price. When the task is over, you can end the contract.

Step 4 – Determine the time requirement

This is a great tip – write down the time requirement for each task.

This is when you realize how much of your week is spent doing core tasks versus how much of your week is spent doing non-core tasks. You may also realize that you have about 30 hours a week of repeatable, non-core work that you do – if that’s the case, then it might be time to hire somebody new or get a virtual assistant to start helping you full-time.

Step 5 – Document the task

In the steps above, you wrote down tasks, determined core versus mechanic, identified the tasks that were repeatable, and estimated the time you spend each week performing them. You are very close to being able to start delegating tasks to your team, to somebody on oDesk, or to your virtual assistant.

But there is one more step to being able to successfully pull this off – have great documentation.

We recently hosted a webinar on how to create documentation for delegation, so I won’t spend any more time on it here – just know that documentation is essential if you plan on successfully delegating. If your documentation is bad, or non-existent, you’ll be spending your days answering questions or re-doing work.

Learn more…

Your ideal situation might be to have an office with a team close by so that you can easily collaborate, make assignments, and have fun. But that situation isn’t available to everyone for one reason or another. If you have to build a team made up of folks from around the globe, check out our recent webinar on how to build a remote team. Pete Williams was our guest, and he did a great job going through the “how to” of outsourcing.

Plus – you’ll also get access to some amazing video lectures and templates that will help you optimize your processes, and get off on the right foot.

What am I missing?

Let me know in the comments how you organized your business so that you are able to spend more time doing what only you can do, and how you delegated everything else away.

But there’s a huge difference between feeling overwhelmed at work and feeling overwhelmed when you were in school – in school you had to push forward and do all your work yourself until it was done. Now – you can just pay somebody else to do your work for you!

So why don’t you?

Not only will you feel a huge sense of relief once you begin offloading jobs to somebody else, but you’ll be able to focus on doing the jobs that only you can do! And that’s the key to growing your business – handing off the mechanics so that you can focus on the core of your business.

Nowadays, running a small to medium sized business takes more work than it ever has before. But that’s okay, because there are plenty of helpers all around the world, waiting for you to hire them at very affordable prices – all you have to do is ask!

Even if all you can do is offload one task a week, if that task takes up an hour or two of your time, that’s between 50 and 100 hours a year that you could spend doing whatever it is you want to do.

Don’t Misunderstand The 4-Hour Workweek

I read The 4-Hour Workweek a few years ago and didn’t really buy into the idea of outsourcing my life so that I could ride a motorcycle through China. Sure it sounds like fun to do nothing but play during my time here on earth, but I want to have some meaning to my life! So I foolishly discounted the concepts that Tim Ferriss was trying to teach, and went on my merry way.

But then I saw a video of Pete Williams talking about those same principles found in The 4-Hour Workweek. Pete’s an Australian entrepreneur who uses those concepts not to necessarily outsource his life away so that he can go tango in Argentina, but so that he can focus on doing what only he can do to grow his businesses (yes, he has several).

After I watched his lecture series, I realized that I misunderstood what The 4-Hour Workweek was really trying to teach me – it’s not about living a vacation for the rest of my life. It’s about building successful businesses by creating a team of workers who can take care of the mechanics while I focus on the core of my business. It’s about getting my workweek down to 4 hours of dealing with mechanics so that the rest of the week I can focus on doing what only I can do to grow my business.

And if my processes are solid, and the documentation of those processes is easy to access and easy to follow, then that team of workers doesn’t even have to be in my office – they can live on the other side of the world, working at a very affordable price. For a small to medium sized business with limited funds, that’s huge!

4 Steps to Get Started

If you’re new to outsourcing/out-tasking, I’ve outlined 4 easy steps to help you get started. What I’ve learned is that building a successful team takes time, and it’s not going to be perfect on the first attempt – it’s a journey. And like every journey, you have to start somewhere.

So start here, right now.

Think of one thing you need done that somebody else could do. Maybe it’s transcribe audio. Maybe it’s editing video footage. Or maybe it’s making cold calls using a script. Whatever it is, follow these four steps to get going.

Step 1 – Go to oDesk and Create an Account

Creating an account is incredibly easy, especially if you have a Facebook account. Go to www.odesk.com and click “Sign up”

Then click “Sign up” under “I need a contractor.”

Create a Free Client Account (I just used Facebook to sign up).

That’s it! After you confirm your account from the email you were sent from oDesk, you now have an account. Now, let’s post a job.

Step 2 – Post a Job

Posting a job is easy and requires zero commitment. You can either hire at an hourly rate, or just hire for a flat fee (e.g. $100 for a logo design).

My advice is if you’re posting a job for the first time, start with something small, something simple, and something that isn’t going to break the bank. The first job that I posted was a simple task – transcribe audio from an interview that I had recorded. I just wanted to get used to the process and get the hang of how to hire somebody before I began outsourcing bigger jobs.

The example in the picture below is from a template that was used as an example during our free outsourcing webinar we had with Pete Williams. It’s a great template to use, and I recommend that you mimic it when posting your first job (go to minutes 25-31 of the webinar to see the template).

After you post a job, a screen will show up and ask you to invite folks to your job. This part isn’t mandatory, it’s just oDesk trying to help you find good people to hire. You can either send invitations to somebody on that list, or you can just skip it.

Step 3 – Wait for somebody to apply

After you post a job, contractors with the skill sets you indicated will be applying to your job. You’ll get an email notification that says, “Congrats! You received an application…”

You can go into oDesk and check your job posting to scan through the applicants. I’ve had anywhere from 5 to 40 applicants apply within 10 minutes of me posting a job. For some jobs I’ve had over 100 applicants.

Step 4 – Hire somebody for the job

After you check out the applicants, you can find one that fits the requirements and either put them on your shortlist, send them a message, or hire them.

I’ve been able to hire for jobs that charge as little as $1.25 an hour. Sometimes the work is fantastic, and sometimes it’s just okay – but this is all part of the learning experience. You’ll learn how to hire A-players, and you’ll know how to conduct follow-up interviews/communications so that you can weed out workers who aren’t a good fit for your project.

Getting the most out of outsourcing

What you’ll find is that a lot of the time, if somebody doesn’t perform well, it’s your own fault. If a job goes wrong, ask yourself, “Was I crystal clear in my instructions? Did I hire somebody who wasn’t a good fit? Did I put in the wrong key words?”

Process design and documentation becomes incredibly important. The better your design and documentation, the more likely you’ll get great results.

After some practice, you’ll get some really solid processes down. At that point, you’ll be able to start looking for more permanent workers to start performing work for you. Once you get others to take responsibility for entire jobs, that’s when you can really just let go of the mechanics, and your business’s potential for growth will increase dramatically.

You Can’t Do It Alone

If you want to build a business you can’t do it alone – you need help. If you have unlimited funds then this is really pretty easy. But if you’re a small to medium size business that is bootstrapped, then sometimes it seems like getting help is impossible.

But it’s not! Getting help in today’s global market is incredibly cost effective if it’s done right.

In this article I showed you how to get started, but if you want some more instruction on how you can grow your business by outsourcing, check out our webinar with Pete Williams. Pete also has an excellent course that goes through the whole process of building a virtual team – check it out here.*

What recommendations do you have for out-tasking?

*Full disclosure – this is an affiliate link. We bought the course and thought it was great.

And then lay motionless in front of the car.

My professor was puzzled why a deer would try to cross the road right at the moment he was passing – no cars in front of him, no cars behind him.

If only that deer had been a little more patient, it would still be alive today!

So my professor decided to do some research and figure out why the deer had such poor judgment when it came to crossing the road. What he found was very surprising – turns out that deer aren’t necessarily dumb creatures, they’re just creatures of habit. And that habit will save them in one situation, and kill them in another.

Why do deer jump in front of cars?

Deer are prey to several animals, and they’ve learned how to survive out there in the wild.

The first thing deer will try to do when they suspect a predator approaching is to try and not draw any attention. They have discovered that if they stand absolutely still, there’s a chance that the potential predator might not even notice them, and just move along; deer will be still until they are sure that they have either been spotted, or the coast is clear.

If they sense that they have been spotted, and a predator is coming right for them, then the deer’s only chance of survival becomes their ability to outrun their attacker. Although deer are fast, there are other animals that are faster – so deer can’t rely on their speed alone. They have to throw in the element of surprise by darting off in different directions.

So when a deer sees your car driving down a country road, it will stand absolutely still until it can determine what’s going on. It doesn’t know if you’re a predator, if you’ve spotted it, or if you’re going to keep heading toward it. But when you continue to approach the deer, it figures that it’s been spotted and that you’re going right for it – its habits kick in, and it darts off in a random direction in an effort to escape.

Sometimes that direction is off in the woods, and sometimes that direction is right in front of your car.

Good strategy depends on the situation

It’s interesting how in one situation, a deer’s habit will save its hide, while in another situation, that very same habit will lead to its demise.

I think that same principle applies to business strategy – in one situation, a strategy might lead to great success, while in another situation that very same strategy will lead to total disaster.

A recent Wall Street Journal article shared a study that revealed how high-power people are oblivious to risk – a great strategy in some scenarios (e.g. Steve Jobs and Apple), and disastrous in others (e.g. the collapse of the global economy).

Another strategy that comes to mind is not paying attention to what consumers say they want. The co-founder of Sony ignored the research when it indicated that the Walkman wasn’t something consumers wanted. He made it anyway and was famously quoted as saying, “We don’t ask consumers what they want. They don’t know. Instead we apply our brain power to what they need, and will want, and make sure we’re there, ready.” That strategy worked amazingly well in the Walkman situation, but what about when they pushed forward with the music subscription service, Pressplay?

A prevailing strategy now is almost the complete opposite – start lean and let customers tell you what they would like so that you build a product they want to use. This strategy is working very well in the software industry, but if it were followed by Sony, the Walkman might not have initially been developed.

The success or failure of a strategy depends on the situation.

What should your strategy be?

I don’t know what your strategy should be – I only know that when you’re developing your strategy, you will need to learn from observation, as well as from your experiences and the experiences of others.

But what’s the best way to learn from past experiences?

If your business, or a similar business, had a bad experience with a strategy, does that mean that you should avoid that same strategy forever?

No, it doesn’t.

Just because one deer jumped in front of a moving car doesn’t mean that all deer everywhere need to stop their current strategy that works so well 95% of the time. It just means that when the deer are next to a road, and a car comes down the road, they should just sit tight. The car isn’t coming for them, so there’s no need to take off running in a random direction – just keep grazing.

Now this also works the other way around. If your business, or a similar business, had a great experience with a strategy, that doesn’t mean that you should just blindly adopt it going forward. You need to pay attention to the scenario in which the strategy was implemented, otherwise you might think that sitting tight is the best approach when a pack of wolves is approaching.

What works in one situation doesn’t always work in another situation.

Don’t be a copy cat

So when you’re learning from your experiences, or the experiences of others, it’s critical that you understand the substance of the strategy, as well as why the strategy brought success or ended in disaster.

If you just copy what you, or others like you, did before, and don’t modify your strategy to fit the situation, you’re going to eventually get hit by a car. Because what worked yesterday in the forest may not work tomorrow on the road.

Just ask my professor.

The band, Barenaked Ladies, had some ideas – they would buy a fur coat, get some fancy furniture, build a tree-fort (fridge included), acquire a llama, eat Kraft dinners, and ride around in a limousine.

So, would your expenditure list look similar to their list – a bunch of random, non-essential luxuries? Or do you know exactly how you would use the money to reach your goals, complete your projects, and accomplish your strategy?

Do you have a plan?

A Company That Has a Plan

Last week, RunRev had a kickstarter campaign to raise funds so it could improve its programming environment, LiveCode. The campaign brought in a respectable £493,795 (roughly $745,136).

That’s a lot of money for a small business, and one could do a lot of fun things with that amount (as the Barenaked Ladies famously pointed out). But instead of buying a Picasso, some fur coats, or a faux green dress, RunRev had some different ideas – RunRev had a plan.

RunRev intends on making LiveCode open source, and adding some pretty sweet features in the next few months, including:

• Resolution Independence
• Cocoa
• Physics Engine
• Vector Shape Objects
• Multimedia Support
• New Browser Control

This is going to be a huge improvement for LiveCode. Not only will a great programming environment be available to a wider audience, but it will enable LiveCode users to make better, more powerful applications. Certainly, a great leap forward for the company as it tries to reach its goals.

How Many Organizations Could Do That?

Since we use LiveCode to develop our applications, this news was pretty exciting for our company; all of these enhancements will directly impact the quality of our products.

As we were watching the kickstarter contributions go up, and reading about the features that would be coming out, we began daydreaming about how they will help us improve Clarify, ScreenSteps, and ScreenSteps Live.

But it also got me thinking about how amazing it is that all RunRev needed to make these significant improvements was an infusion of cash. How many organizations could make dramatic improvements if only they had an additional million dollars?

Making Use of Additional Resources Isn’t Easy

You’re probably thinking, “Ummm… anybody could make dramatic improvements if they just had more money!” But I don’t think that’s the case.

True, most everybody realizes that they need extra money. But that’s different than knowing exactly what to do if you actually had that extra money. That’s why I’m always impressed when organizations can bring in resources and immediately put them to work.

Whether it be an infusion of human capital (like when we helped with the Hurricane Sandy cleanup), or an infusion of cash, it takes a lot of organizing, planning, coordination, and cooperation to make good use of additional resources.

A good example of how this concept might elude some folks can be found in President Obama’s comment when the country discovered that the stimulus bill didn’t bring the desired results. The presidency communicated that there were thousands of shovel-ready jobs, and all that was needed was some money. A little while later, when the infusion of money didn’t produce the expected results, President Obama quipped, “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.”

Indeed it was not. Money only solves your problems if you have a solid, detailed plan.

Sometimes you might think that your organization has shovel-ready jobs, and that all you need is some extra money. But if all you’ve done is recognize that it would be nice to have more money, and haven’t actually figured out exactly what that money would do, then you’re going to be disappointed when the money is gone before anything worthwhile came of it.

You need to have a solid, detailed plan.

What if You Had a Million Dollars?

Let’s say that instead of using the money for themselves, RunRev decided to give you the kickstarter contributions. How would you put the money to use? I’m sure you recognize that you could use additional funds, but do you have a plan? Would you get the most bang for your buck? Or would the money slowly disappear into oblivion?

My guess is that if you don’t know exactly what you’d do with additional resources, whether that be human capital or money, then you’re not ready to grow.

That doesn’t mean you won’t grow. But kind of like my teenage years, you won’t be very coordinated during your growth spurt. You’ll fall down as you trip over your own feet, and experience some pain as you bonk your head on light fixtures (Neither I, nor the house I grew up in, were ready for me to be 6’3″).

Prepare Yourself for Growth

If you would like to grow your organization, then you need to have a plan in place so that all you need is extra money or a few more helping hands. Even if you don’t have any plans to borrow cash or get investors, you should still put a structure in place and have a strategy ready for when you do.

Identifying your growth strategy and your growth plan not only prepare you to make better use of future resources, but it will help you make better use of your current resources too! It will help you understand how your current activities fit into your overall strategy. It will help you identify which activities you should be doing, and which ones you just can’t do with your current resources. It will help you focus your everyday efforts so that you don’t get distracted by shiny things.

And then, when you get additional resources, you’ll have a better sense of where they could go and what they could do.

So prepare your organization to answer the imaginary circumstance, “If I had a million dollars…” Because you never know when you just might.

It’s not a mistake because SharePoint is a bad tool; on the contrary, it can practically do everything! But, not everybody knows what they want it to do, or how they want to use it – so it just ends up being a shared drive where PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations dwell – all the while, gathering cyber dust and not being helpful to anyone.

If you’re trying to build an actionable knowledge base, this just won’t cut it.

What is an Actionable Knowledge Base?

There are knowledge bases, and there are actionable knowledge bases. A knowledge base is where everybody throws their white papers, training slides, Excel tools, and old on-boarding presentations. The information may be useful, but it’s not very actionable.

Sure it might help to know what the big picture is for why insurance premiums are going up, but that doesn’t help anybody when they’re trying to update a customer’s account.

That’s exactly what an actionable knowledge base is – a place for storing information that helps your team perform tasks such as updating customer accounts, creating invoices, creating a webinar, etc.

Organizations need to be building more actionable knowledge bases and fewer knowledge bases.

Why do I need an Actionable Knowledge Base?

If you aren’t building an actionable knowledge base, then you’ll never really be able to delegate tasks to other team members. Although you might be able to get away with standing over your teammate’s shoulder, explaining every button he/she is supposed to click is not a foundation that you can grow your team on because it always requires interaction from you.

And if you’re constantly answering questions, you can’t focus on other, more important tasks. Nor can you ever take vacation, get sick, or grow into a new management role. There needs to be another source for obtaining the information that they need – one that doesn’t involve a lot of hands on attention.

Your team needs something to reference

Learning something new doesn’t come by just hearing it once – it takes repetition. So when somebody is performing a task that is new to him/her, even if he/she was taught how to do it in a fancy training two months ago, questions will come up. Questions about the little details. And for those questions, you need to have material that is easy to reference.

If reference material is not easily available, then either the task will be done incorrectly, or you be constantly answering questions as they come up.

That’s not a very good model for running things.

What does SharePoint do?

SharePoint is an incredibly powerful tool that can do amazing things… if you know how to use it, and you have a team of developers who can build custom sites.

Some companies use it to build their entire public facing website. Others use it to create dashboards or to create forms. But from my experience, most people just end up using it as a document repository.

And a document repository is not an actionable knowledge base.

It’s not that SharePoint is incapable of making actionable knowledge bases – it’s just that SharePoint is meant to be so many things to so many people that it’s not intuitive to the user how it should be used for building a knowledge base. You practically need a developer or a team of consultants to come in and teach you how to use this fancy tool – and that is costly, time-consuming, and very rarely gives you the results that you were after.

So teams usually get SharePoint and just begin using it to store documents – building a knowledge base that is confusing to navigate, not very searchable, and not referenced very often.

Why is a document repository bad?

Remember how I said that people need to reference something when they’re learning how to do something new? Well trying to find a reference in a document repository is awful. The one piece of information you need might be locked in a PowerPoint presentation that was given three years ago… on slide 201 of 276.

Nobody will look that hard for information, especially when they can just ping you over a chat service.

What do I need then?

You need an actionable knowledge base that is:

• Easy to build
• Easy to search
• Easy to update
• Teaches how to do actionable tasks

If you have an actionable knowledge base, you’ll be able to delegate tasks to others. You’ll spend less time explaining how to do work and more time getting things done. You can easily bounce back from employee turnover. And you can finally spend your vacation not checking your email every 10 minutes.

For tips on how we’re building our actionable knowledge base, check out the article on Creating a Turnkey Business.

Many folks misunderstand the risk their teams and organizations face when it comes to employee turnover. I’ve spoken to some business owners who have the idea that they can “get by without so and so” and that “everybody is replaceable.” While it’s true that your employees are replaceable, your team will still incur a cost as a result of somebody’s departure.

Even when organizations understand the negative consequences of employee turnover, they tend to focus more of their attention on preventing employees from leaving instead of preparing for their departure.

Whether you ignore the risk, or misunderstand it, it is the same – you’re living with more risk than you realize and you are not prepared to successfully manage it. What follows is my attempt to explain the risk of employee turnover and how building a turnkey business can help you reduce your exposure.

It starts with a threat

To better understand any risk you face, the first step is to identify the threat. And in the business world, the threat of employee turnover affects every organization to some degree.

What’s the likelihood of the threat?

The second step is determining the likelihood that the threat will occur with an estimate of the likelihood of impact.

Regarding the likelihood that the threat of employee turnover will occur, consider a recent report from PwC – “We predict considerably higher voluntary separation rates for 2013 and beyond, higher than what we have seen during the past eight years.”

Sounds bleak. And that’s just voluntary separations – it doesn’t include layoffs or retirement.

Think about your team and your organization – what have the trends been over the past few years? If you’ve had little to no turnover, then you’re one of the lucky ones. In today’s work force, I think it’s safe to say that the likelihood of employee turnover occurring is pretty high.

Concerning the likelihood of impact that turnover will have, that’s something that you’ll have to determine on your own. Speaking from experience, it’s pretty rare that somebody’s departure had no impact.

What’s the impact of the threat?

The level of impact is a measure of the magnitude of pain that you can expect to feel as a result of the threat occurring. Trying to quantify that pain is what makes up step three.

If you experienced turnover on your team, what would the impact be? Would it take a long time to find somebody? Would it take a long time to train somebody? How much money would it cost? How much work would everybody else have to put in to cover for somebody in their absence? Could operations even continue if somebody from your team were gone? How would the new-hire receive training? Does your team have availability to train somebody new?

To give you a sense of what other companies are feeling in terms of impact, it roughly costs 150% of the replacement’s annual pay when an organization brings in somebody new. This is due to recruiting costs and training costs, but also a cost that is not so obvious to organizations – lost productivity. Studies show that it takes more than 6 months before a new-hire adds more value than they’ve consumed. In some organizations, that might even be a conservative estimate.

Determine the risk

Likelihood and impact are not to just be considered alone – risk is a combination of the likelihood of a threat event’s occurrence and the estimated negative impact it would have if it did occur.

Now that you have considered both items separately, it’s time to put them together and quantify the risk.

I don’t want to speak for your team, but from what I’ve observed I think it’s fair to determine that the threat of employee turnover is somewhat likely to happen and that it will have some impact – resulting in a risk of “High.”

Determine your residual risk

The above assessment is based on the assumption that you have not put in place anything to quash the likelihood and impact that the threat of employee turnover would have. But we both know that’s not true. Almost every team and every organization is working hard to reduce these two aspects of risk, leaving them with a residual risk.

Residual risk is defined as the exposure to loss remaining after other known risks have been countered, factored in, or eliminated. So after you define all the measures you’ve put in place to reduce the likelihood and impact of employee turnover, you can reassess where you fall on that risk chart. If you have systems in place that reduce the likelihood and the impact to a level of residual risk that you are comfortable with, you can relax a little bit.

If you realize that your residual risk is too high, then you need to continue looking for ways to decrease the likelihood and reduce the impact until you reach a level you’re comfortable with.

Organizations are not effectively reducing residual risk

My observation is that most organizations have a false sense of security because they misunderstand their residual risk – they are working feverishly to reduce the likelihood that there is employee turnover, but almost completely ignoring what must be done to reduce the impact.

How organizations are reducing the likelihood

Look at all of the initiatives that are in place to reduce the likelihood of employee turnover. Millions of dollars have been spent on implementing concierge services for employees, incentive plans, flexibility to work on various projects of interest, teleworking policies, and other perks so that employees will remain happy.

As an example of this, just look at the Big 4 Accounting Firms – all four of them are in the top 100 places to work. They are also regularly ranked as the top places to work if you are a working mom, and currently have initiatives to be more flexible and allow for a better balance between family and work.

That’s quite a turnaround from the “burn and churn” mentality of 20 years ago.

How organizations are reducing the impact

Organizations are starting to come along in this area, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. We’ve spoken to managers and customers who have expressed sincere concern over the lack of usable knowledge bases that capture actionable information.

Teams and organizations know that they need a knowledge base, but there seems to be a misunderstanding regarding what needs to go into the knowledge base. While abstract white papers and PowerPoint presentations are great for explaining things at a very high level, it’s not very good for a new-hire who needs to man the help desk, fill out an acquisition form, or perform an internal audit (i.e. do anything productive).

If you want to reduce the impact your team feels when somebody leaves, and in turn reduce your residual risk of employee turnover, then you need to implement a system that empowers new-hires to be able to walk right in and be productive from day one. Especially when reports such as this one from The Wall Street Journal reveal that “American companies don’t seem to do training anymore.”

Your goal shouldn’t be to just have a knowledge base for the sake of having one – that doesn’t actually do anything to reduce your risk. You need to build a knowledge base with actionable information.

Your residual risk is higher than you think

That is why organizations are living with more risk than they realize, or are willing to admit. They think that they’ve reduced their residual risk as it relates to employee turnover because they have measures in place to improve employee retention – but now we know that that is only half of the equation. That narrow focus only reduces the likelihood of somebody leaving – it doesn’t do anything to reduce the pain you’re going to feel when you have to bring somebody in, train them, and efficiently get them to a level that puts your operations back on track.

The residual risk is still fairly high because nothing substantial has been done to reduce the impact that employee turnover has on your team.

Distinguish yourself from the competition

The real game changer in the future won’t be whether organizations can increase their retention. Maybe teams will get a handle on that, maybe they won’t. But that problem will never be fully solved, especially as the work force changes and the makeup of organizations evolve. People are going to leave.

So the real game changer, the one thing that will distinguish you from the rest of the pack, will be whether your team and organization can capture all of the relevant knowledge before it walks out the door, and build an actionable knowledge base. Because if you can effectively capture knowledge, and that knowledge can easily be transferred to somebody else, then employee turnover won’t have such an adverse effect on your team and its operations. By building a turnkey business, new employees will be able to replace employees who have left, and reduce the pain you feel because they will be more productive in less time.

If you don’t have a plan to capture your employees’ actionable knowledge, then you’re putting yourself in a very risky situation.