Speaker 1: What would happen in your business if the top five people walked out the door and you had to replace them with fresh new faces tomorrow? It's kind of terrifying, right? But the secret is, it actually doesn't have to be. Because centralising knowledge and creating an effective training manual for your team not only prepares you for every eventuality, but it actually also makes your existing team operate like a well-oiled machine. Hi, I'm Mike Bander, one of the co-founders of Waybook, and in this video, we're going to dive into how to create effective training manuals for your team. A training manual is essential for any business. It comprises of knowledge documents, procedures and policies. And while there are hundreds of ways to create one, by having a really clear, accessible training manual, your team can avoid the confusion that often comes when learning on the job. Now, this not only accelerates the integration of new hires, but it actually standardises the way that tasks are performed, reducing errors and inconsistencies, and ultimately improving the overall productivity of your business. Think of it as your team's go-to guide for success. We created Waybook to be the ultimate business playbook tool for growing businesses. No more juggling multiple systems for training and having knowledge spread across different knowledge bases, shared drives and also in your mind. Waybook helps you centralise everything into a single structured source of truth, and it's essentially where your team go for their onboarding, for their training and where knowledge lives for people to always have access to that seamlessly. By the end of this video, you will have a training manual for one of your core roles within the business, as well as an easily repeatable process to create an entire playbook for your whole business. Now, I'm not just talking about giving people a document that will help them out. I'm talking about providing your team with the essential information that they need to do their best work. I'm talking about providing them with an AI-powered chatbot that's fluent on your company knowledge, private to your team and specific to each individual role. I'm talking about putting you in the driving seat, giving you access to all of the tracking and the reporting that you and your managers need to see to actually know who knows what and what more information they need to know. All of this can be created in a matter of minutes, but I assure you it really will last a lifetime. It can be accessed by your whole team wherever they are and whatever they need to know. So let's go. There are seven essential steps to easily creating your training manual. And instead of just explaining these steps, in this video, I'm going to do it with you. So let's start with step one. This is essentially identifying our training needs. Firstly, we need to identify what needs exist within the business. Start by pinpointing the core roles and the responsibilities of these roles that we're looking to focus on. What context do they need? What activities do they perform? What tools do they need access to? As an example, I'm going to create a training manual for a marketing executive in a legal practice. And while the specifics I create will likely be different to the roles that you're building, the process and approach is exactly the same. Now, in this step, we're looking to create the structure of the information that we need to create in an organized set of subjects or folders and documents. This way, the knowledge is structured in a way that will not only be useful for our specific hire, but also for other people in the business as we continue to grow out our playbook. While you can, of course, easily just list the documents you want to create, I'm going to use Weibook's AI-powered playbook builder to start from scratch. Now, you can see here, I'm literally starting from a bank page. This is a brand new account with no custom information in. So I'm just going to jump into the edit mode, head down into AI creator and look to create a structure. Now, while there are pre-created structures of different playbooks, I'm going to use the Weibook AI creator to literally ask to create a playbook for a marketing manager of a legal practice. Now, within this step, we can give as much context and information as you'd like, and you can also create more information based on the background of the company, the team size, and everything else within your Weibook settings. Now, instantly, you'll see here that I have all of the fundamentals that I want to create. I have the target audience and about a marketing strategy, the brand guidelines, how we run client relationships, how we do public relations, and also how we track that performance. Now, this is very specific for that marketing hire, but in order for it to be a full training manual, I'd probably also want to add in an introduction. So here, I can just ask for that. Add an introduction to the legal practice. So we're sort of looking for different welcome documents, introducing the team and other elements like that, an essential part of our training manual. Now, instantly, Weibook has created a firm overview, the attorney profiles, how our culture works, and how the competition landscape. So looking at all of this, I'm quite happy with that. So I'm just going to now add that into our Weibook. And instantly, we now have all of the documents that we need to create in a structured format for our new hires training manual. Now we have this, it's essentially a to-do list of the documents. It's time for us to start to gather that content. Now, at Weibook, we like to run on the principle of first noting for yourself and then editing for somebody else. That's essentially creating the bare bones of a document that can essentially be done in one of four different ways. Templates, imports, AI, or Weibook Shots. And this is largely dependent on how much knowledge you already have within the business, and whether it lives in a document or actually in somebody's head. So firstly, let's look at templates. We can now pull on the document templates and actually look at one of the hundreds of Weibook templates that we're able to literally pull on and put directly into our training manual. Now, what I'm going to do is just search for legal, and perhaps we wanted to put in a professional code of conduct or how we do team management and communication, record keeping, or any one of the hundred documents that we have. Pulling on this document, I'm able to then make sure that it's exactly what I wanted and adding that into one of the core pieces of information, and perhaps we'll put that into our section about the firm. Now, this obviously isn't entirely customized to the business, but it's a pretty good basis for us to then be able to go through, edit and optimize that content to make it really specific for your individual business. Now, if you already have your existing knowledge living somewhere else, you can then simply import that document directly into your Weibook. Here, we can go into import, we decide where we want to put that document, and then we select a file from wherever that knowledge may live already. Weibook will then import that document, extract the information, and then simply place that wherever you want it to go. The third way of easily creating the bare bones of your content is using the Weibook AI document creator. So if we pick one of the documents that lives within our to-do list, we'll go into client communication, we can actually do the templates, the import, or create. Now, Weibook will automatically generate a brief for that document, and of course, we can actually add more context for a legal practice. And of course, if you set that in your Weibook settings, it will already know what you're trying to build. Now, with a click of a button, Weibook will then create you the fundamentals of that document, which essentially means that all you need to do is customize and edit it to make it really perfect for your business. So with the client communication guidelines, Weibook AI has generated the fundamentals of how we proactively communicate, manage expectations, personalize approaches, create documents, continuous improvement, and some fundamentals on client communication. Now, I'm quite happy with the fundamentals of this, so I'll simply add that into the document, which we can then later come back and optimize that to share. Now, the fourth way of centralizing that information for your training manual can be using Weibook Shots. Weibook Shots is an SOP capture tool that means if I open Shots and start recording, I can literally do whatever work I'm trying to document and delegate, and Shots will automatically record it for me. So if I wanted to share how you change your signature on Gmail, I'll simply just click into settings, make sure I'm on general, and scroll down to the different signatures, where I can then click create, add a new signature, and whatever work I'm doing here, you'll see that it's literally screenshotting what I'm doing, highlighting what needs to be created, created a brief description of what to do, that I can then save that SOP and then import that directly into our Weibook. The final way, of course, is sitting in front of the blank screen and just bullet pointing the content that you need to know. Either one of these, you can create a simple version of the knowledge you want to share in a matter of minutes. So now we've got the bare bones of the fundamental documents we're looking to share, now we can start with step three, is editing for context and for understanding. With the outlines of our documents in place, now is the time for us to run through these documents and start to decide what is the best way to present that information. The secret here is to try and make your documents as engaging as possible. Look to split down the documents into basic steps, embed videos where appropriate, and if you think that content lacks clarity, you can expand on that text, of course, using Weibook AI if you wish, or turn text into images linked to other necessary information and even add files or other resources that people need. Finally, decide what you as a manager need to know to have the confidence that your team has not just seen the information, but they understand it. For essential information, we recommend adding a test or assessment to the document, deciding what questions people need to answer for you to really have that confidence. Now, of course, you can create this manually within your Weibook, but you've probably guessed by now that if anything is worth doing, I would like it to be done with a click. So in this example, we can create a test with AI and Weibook will simply read that document, prioritize the most important elements to test your team on, and create multiple choice questions which will prove to you that they have understood that knowledge. Now, step four is creating a learning pathway. Now we've essentially created the essential information in a structured format, we can decide in what order do we want somebody to see that information. This can be done in many ways, creating a list in an email or on a piece of paper, or of course, just telling someone what you want them to do and when you want them to do it. However, to create a professional consistent and tracked experience, then you can also create a learning pathway in Weibook. You can decide what documents do you want that role to complete and in what order, as well as adding in different tasks that you want them to do as part of their onboarding and training. Here we can create clear learning pathways to guide them through the material step by step, and even set deadlines which will customize that experience for that person as they navigate through that training. Step five is sharing that knowledge. Now with the content created and the flow of that content designed, it's essentially time to share that knowledge. It's important to make sure that your team has easy access to the training manual no matter where they are. There are a few fundamentals to consider here, making sure that they have instant access, ensuring that there is a unified search across all of your knowledge, making sure each person has the right access to the knowledge and information that you need them to know. By creating your training manual in Weibook, you can easily decide who has access to your core information. You can simply create groups around roles, locations, seniority, and decide what they can see and control within your content. Now the beauty of creating groups in Weibook is once you've created those groups, they will truly scale with you and your team, meaning that you can add new hires into similar roles and always give them the same level of control and access. Now if you're thinking that may be a little complex to get started, there is of course a one-click solution in Weibook where Weibook AI will create out the suggested groups based on the information it has about your business. So now we've created all of the fundamental knowledge for that hire, the custom role, and given them access. Step six is setting a schedule for review and adding more information. Now the hard work is complete, it's important to ensure that this information is still everything that your team needs and remains up to date by setting a review cycle and an improvement schedule. We recommend looking at your training manual every two to four weeks and looking at the few ways that you can understand what people think about your knowledge and how they're dealing with it. For example, you can look at the feedback that somebody has given on that document. You can see exactly who has seen what, when they've accessed it, how many times they've viewed it, and you can even look at the searches that people are making and the questions that they're asking on your knowledge base. This enables you to identify what knowledge gaps exist in the business. Feel free to make changes and optimize your documents and once you're happy with the change, you can simply publish and if you wish, notify the people who need to know the updated information so they can simply come back in, review the updates, and get themselves back up to speed. So now you can be fully confident that the team member that we've designed this training manual for is fully equipped to do their best work as well as all future people in that role. Now that we've completed the training manual for one role, it's time to just do it again for another. The magic here is that many of the necessary documents will already be created, making it much easier for you to create your training manual for the second role. Soon with a few cycles, you'll have a complete playbook for your business and as a pro tip, once you have a few documents that you're very happy with, consider turning them into internal templates and asking your team to create their own documents. The internal templates will mean that the information is always clear and consistent but the beautiful part of this is it helps you identify the discrepancies between our expectation and the reality of how things are currently being operated. This offers us the perfect chance for us to optimize and improve not just the knowledge but actually how our business is operating. There you have it, the seven steps that will turn your information into knowledge and equip your team for the long term. If you're looking to create an employee training manual, feel free to start with Weibook's free trial to save heaps of time, maintain consistency and also deliver a really professional output for you and also your team. If you're looking for more tips on creating essential documentation to streamline your business, check out our video on how to create an effective standard operating procedure and until next time, I hope you enjoy some smooth scaling.