5 Ways Small Businesses Can Use Training Management Software As Their Knowledge Base
In a small business, it is even more important to have procedures and processes in place to make sure things are done consistently across the entire company. It may seem tempting to let this slip in a smaller business because you could be forgiven for thinking that a smaller team will simply be able to communicate with each other. However, if you simply rely on this system, you can end up with lots of gatekeepers all over your business, meaning that there are only one or two people who know all the information about certain departments or processes.
This system may work well when everything is in working order, but if someone is off sick, on holiday, or leaves your company, you could end up in trouble. All your previous tried and tested systems that have been in place for ages could suddenly fall away when the person who knew how to work them leaves, and it turns out they were the only person who knew how to run things that way.
Administrate is here to help you manage your entire training operation, and for smaller businesses, we can help make sure that you have a centralised knowledge base that your entire business can refer to, rather than ending up with lots of knowledge gatekeepers, which can only end in disaster.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can rely on Administrate to make sure your small business continues to run smoothly.
1. Upload All Your Documents To Administrate
The first stage of making Administrate your one-stop-shop for all your company documents is to upload everything to our Document Management System (DMS). This is good for a number of reasons:
- Everything is in one place, so you don’t need to worry about wasting time searching for a document or worry about it being stored somewhere you aren’t able to access.
- Even if someone else owns a document, if they are on holiday or leave the company, you will still be able to access the document through our DMS.
- Documents can easily be downloaded wherever you are, not just on a company computer. This is great if you’re having to work on the go.
- If you download a document and make changes to it, you can re-upload it into the DMS, meaning that the latest version will be available instantly for anyone else who needs to access it. Our revision history feature will also mean that you can see when the document was last updated and who last uploaded it, in case you have any questions about it.
- Everything is stored securely online, so there’s no need to worry about losing them, accidentally deleting them, or your computer crashing and everything disappearing.
- Documents can be easily organised in a company standard folder system, so everything is really easy to find, and everyone knows exactly where to look.
- If you’re worried about keeping documents secure, you can use permissions to make sure documents are only accessible to the people who need to see them.
2. Set Up Learning Tracks For Staff On-Boarding With Current Job Holders
In order make sure a new member of staff is on-boarded effectively into your company, you need to set up a staff on-boarding plan. You can have one general one for company-wide processes, but you’ll also need specific ones for each job role you offer.
You can use Administrate’s learning tracks feature to set up a plan of exactly what training a member of staff needs to complete, what order it needs to be done in, and when it needs to be done by. This is perfect for new staff training, as you can have the learning tracks already created and good to go when a new member of staff joins the team.
However, if you’re a smaller business, you may only have a very small team, and things like on-boarding plans may not be considered until you’ve hired someone new, but the previous member of staff may already have left by then.
That’s why it’s so important to sit down and create onboarding plans for each role/team in your business, even if you’re not actively hiring for those roles at the moment. It’s important to get ahead of the game, and have procedures in place, and who is better placed to help you build a training plan for a job role than the person who currently works in that role or team?
Once the learning tracks are created, you can store them in Administrate, and be safe in the knowledge that they are securely stored, and will be complete and easy to access when the time comes to use them.
3. Use Course Templates To Keep Courses Consistent
If it’s your job to set up all the courses your business runs, chances are you probably have a lot of information on how this is done stored in your head, especially if you’re doing it every day. Things like the sizes of classrooms, which resources are in which office, which location will suit a particular kind of training, which tutors are experienced to teach certain classes, etc., will just be second-nature to you, meaning that anyone taking over this job in the future could end up taking significantly longer to complete the same task than you would.
Administrate’s course templates feature means you can template as much of the course information as possible, with only specific details such as the date and time of the training needing to be sorted out when the course goes live. The rest of the information will automatically be duplicated whenever you use that specific course template. You can include notes like exactly which resources each class will need, and things such as the classroom this class has to run in, and the specific amount of sessions that make up the class will be populated automatically.
Administrate will also only allow you to assign tutors which have the correct experience to specific classes, and will also prevent you from doing things like double booking tutors or resources. This means that if someone does need to take over scheduling all your courses, all the information they need will be stored in Administrate, and your whole training business won’t come to a halt!
4. Store All Contact Details In The CRM
As with your company documents, it is vital that you make the move to storing all your company contacts within Administrate’s CRM. It can be tempting for different people and different teams to have their own personal systems for keeping contact details, especially if they are for people that they contact on a regular basis. However, making the move to a centralised contact system is a good idea for the following reasons:
- As with your documents, you don’t need to spend lots of time looking for different contact details or going through different team members to get what you want, as everything is stored centrally.
- There will be no confusion over contact details, as there will only be one version which everyone is working on. So you don’t need to worry about someone mistyping a phone number or an email address when they pass the details on to you.
- Using our CRM means you can keep a record of all the points of contact you have with someone, so other members of staff can easily see who was the last person to contact them, or when they were last contacted. This ensures you aren’t phoning the same person five times in the same day.
5. Use A Message Centre Instead Of Shared Inboxes
When someone leaves the business or goes on holiday, you can run the risk of half-finished conversations being left in their email inbox, or people who aren’t aware they’ve left the business still trying to contact them about something that could be dealt with by someone else in your team.
A shared email address for your department could seem like a good way around this problem, but you still aren’t able to see if the employee in questions had already replied to a query and perhaps had started a conversation with a potential customer for example.
Administrate allows you to use a message centre instead of a shared inbox, meaning all the emails will be collected into your message centre, where appropriate members of staff can then log in and deal with the emails. Our message centre also means you can see who has dealt with the query and whether they replied or not. This means if a member of staff does leave, you will be able to see any queries which they were in the process of dealing with and will be able to pick up where they left off without any interruption to the person who contacted you.
Interested?
If you’re interested in seeing how Administrate could specifically work for smaller business, why not book a personalised demo with one of our team, and ask them all your burning questions?!
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