MSP Onboarding: How Documentation Makes Onboarding Staff Easy

In the previous article in our onboarding series, we discussed best practices for onboarding new employees. But there is no point in developing exceptional practices if they cannot be replicated. That’s where IT Glue™ can help.

One of the barriers to documenting onboarding procedures is the lack of an effective documentation tool. The knowledge of this process is either locked in the heads of a few managers or HR personnel, or it is written down in a Word doc somewhere. With IT Glue, documentation is easier to do, which means people are more likely to do it, and ultimately it is also easier to retrieve information as well.

Formalize processes

IT Glue is a documentation platform. All of these wonderful best practices you have created can be documented — paperwork, workflow diagrams, task assignments, the works. By documenting your processes, you formalize them. This allows for all of that information to be centralized. If during the next onboarding you have different HR staff or different hiring managers, the processes can be replicated exactly as they were before because the entire process has been documented and stored in IT Glue.

Evaluate and improve procedures

Once all of these procedures are documented, it is easier to evaluate how to improve the procedures. The things that worked and the things that didn’t can be evaluated — you know what you did because it’s in the docs — the procedure can be altered. This is the same principle as any other improvement process. Improving onboarding can be an iterative process when there is sufficient documentation about the process.

Store and transfer knowledge

IT Glue is also your ace in the hole for training. You have a tremendous amount of knowledge in your company, but how much of that is written down? Think about your biggest client. Now think about who you trust to service that client. Ideally, even a new hire would be trusted to deal with your most difficult clients, because everything that the organization knows about the client has been documented. Most of the time, however, this isn’t the case. Without this documentation, your new hires have to learn about processes and clients from your more experienced staff. Not only does it take forever to get new people up to speed, but they take time away from your top performers to get there.

Grow your business

Once you have documented procedures, it is easier to apply them to multiple locations. A small MSP in a single location often gets away without having much documentation. However, having processes within a click or two of anybody within the organization allows for best practices to be replicated anytime, anywhere, including your second, third or fourth office. The consistency and replicability of best practices that have been stored in IT Glue allows you to grow your business to the next level.

The bottom line

Why does all this matter? New hires are expensive. It costs money to find people, and that’s before they even start. Then you have to pay them. Estimates for the cost of new hires place this at the equivalent of six to nine months’ of their salary, and on top of that, you have to consider how much you’re not making because your managers and top performers are training those new hires. Chris Day, CEO of IT Glue, posted about this, comparing the difference in cost between a new hire at an average MSP versus a new hire at a best-in-class MSP.

With a documentation service like IT Glue, new hires get up to speed faster. They learn about your partners faster. Your experienced talent can spend less time training, and go back to being their most productive selves. All told, a strong documentation platform can cut the costs associated with onboarding and training by thousands of dollars. This is what we call Freeing Minds™. With best practices and key client information documented, everybody can spend more time on the tasks that drive your business, and less time at suboptimal levels of effectiveness.