Making onboarding and training SOPs painless with Jennifer Smith

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Agency Management Institute Community, where you’ll learn how to grow and scale your business, attract and retain the best talent, make more money, and keep more of what you make. The Build a Better Agency podcast presented by White Label IQ is packed with insights on how small to mid-size agencies survive and thrive in today’s market, bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. Welcome back for another episode of Build a Better Agency. Super glad to have you back. Going to have a great conversation today. Before we do that though, one of the things I’m going to start doing on the podcast is I’m going to start talking about some of the speakers who are specifically going to be on the on the podcast. That’s not where they’re going to be. They’re going to be at the summit with us May 16th and 17th in Chicago. So one of the keynote speakers is a gentleman named Mitch Joel. Many of you probably know him. He is authored several books, Six Pixels of Separation and several others. So Mitch’s career has been varied, but mostly he was an agency owner. So he and some buddies started a small shop in Canada back in the day.

And it was, what many of you are doing is, it was a five, 10-person shop for a long time. And then some things started to happen, and I don’t want to give away his story, but Mitch is going to sit on the stage and tell us how he went from running a five-person agency to growing that agency, to getting the attention of one of the largest holding companies in the agency’s space and finally ultimately selling his agency to that holding company. So it’s an amazing journey, but it is a journey filled with moments and milestones that every single one of you could replicate if you wanted to. And so it is a story of surprise. It’s a story of good fortune. It’s a story of hard luck or hard work paying off. It is a story of luck. It is a story of tenacity, but there’s nothing fantastical about the story.

There’s nothing magic that happened, and everything they did that led them to getting on the radar screen of this holding company and then ultimately negotiating the sale, all of that is stuff that you could be doing. So Mitch is going to be one of the speakers at the summit. We would love to have you join us again, that’s May 16th and 17th. If you’re an AMI member at any level, so a silver, gold, platinum, virtual peer group, live peer group, you are eligible to attend Family Day, which is on Monday the 15th will come in right after lunch. We’re going to have three different speakers. We’re going to talk about some topics just unique to that group of people. And then we’re all going to go out to dinner together. And then the conference itself is Tuesday and Wednesday. So we’d love to have you join us.

All the speakers are amazing, but Mitch is going to be one that you do not want to miss. Okay. All right. So with that, let me tell you a little bit about our guest. So when I was actively running my agency, I did not like the S word, and the S word for me was systems. I like many of you that came up through the creative ranks, bristled at the idea that you could systemize creativity, that you could systemize a lot of parts of agency life. But when I owned my own agency, which I still do, but when I started the agency and started realizing how much tribal knowledge we were all walking around with and how everybody was sort of doing the same thing but in a different way, it was Bob’s way and Mary’s way, Drew’s way, I learned very quickly that process and systems are not prohibitive, but they actually are freeing and they actually are a serious CYA to cover your rear end in case something happens in case someone leaves.

Lots of reasons why it makes sense to have systems and processes. But recording systems and processes and capturing them, super hard. And one of the systems and processes that we as agency people sort of suck the most at is onboarding new employees and training employees. And so all of that said, our guest today is going to talk about how we can do that more efficiently, more effectively, less painfully and better. So Jennifer Smith owns a company called Scribe. She has a really interesting career path that I’m going to let her talk to you about. But basically Scribe is a software that helps capture systems and processes and keep them in a way and in a place where your whole team can access them. So with that, I want to introduce you to Jennifer because we have lots to talk about. All right, let’s get going.

Jennifer, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Jennifer Smith:

Thanks so much for having me, Drew.

Drew McLellan:

So give everybody a little sense of your career trajectory and how you came to have all of this insight and knowledge about what we’re going to talk about today, which is really remote onboarding, remote training, how that all impacts culture in today’s environment?

Jennifer Smith:

So it’s a pretty non-linear path, which I often think the most interesting ones are. So I’m currently the CEO and co-founder of Scribe. We are a enterprise software company based in San Francisco. When we make software that automatically creates documentation on your processes, I can talk more about that. I started my career as a management consultant at McKinsey working in the organization and operations practices, which is kind of a mouthful and sounds fancy. What it practically meant was I flew around the country and would go to these big op centers, I think like Salt Lake City where there would be hundreds of people sitting in a center. And I would go in cubicle surf and find the best people in that op center. And I would sit next to them and I would look over their shoulders and I’d ask them questions, “Why are you doing things that way?”

What is this? And what they would all say to me is, “Hey, this is all the stuff I was trained to do.” And I’m going to date myself. They’d pull out a really thick binder, this was 15 years ago, now I assume it’s digital. “Okay, dunk it down on the table.” And they’d say, “I had to memorize everything here, but you know, I found these 30 shortcuts instead. And this is really what I’m doing.” And my team would have to watch what they were doing on their screens and write that down in PowerPoint and then give that back to our customers. And I always thought, well gosh, that works. If you’ve got a 28-year-old overpaid Jennifer sitting with a Lenovo ThinkPad watching you like, “What would you do otherwise?” And this doesn’t really seem very scalable, does it? How you fast forward and I’m living in Silicon Valley in Venture Capital and spent a lot of my time talking to buyers of enterprise software.

So folks at companies large and small. And I would just get curious and ask them, “What are some of the biggest problems you’re trying to solve?” And this was even pre COVID. And they would say, “Well, my company runs on processes.” It’s people who show up every day and have specialized knowledge on how to do things. And that walks out the door every day at 5:00 PM and I’ve got to hope that it comes back. And I try to capture it from people, but it’s really hard to do. I mean, my only choice is to either hire the 28-year-old Jennifer or ask them to take time away from their job and write down what they know how to do and that’s expensive and unpopular. And so I found this [inaudible 00:07:38]-

Drew McLellan:

That type of knowledge is scary. I mean, you’re right, the knowledge literally walks out the door every day, and also mutates over time. Even if the person comes back, their memory and how they do things and how they describe it is going to evolve over time, whether it’s accurate or not.

Jennifer Smith:

And then you have something like a global pandemic and that knowledge now not even in the same place, but it sort of distributed all over. It really struck kind of home with me what we were doing. We started building a company be before the pandemic. And I think now this remote world has really accelerated a problem that was hiding in plain sight when we’re all sitting next to each other. You sort of took for granted that you could just ask the person sitting next to you. But I had the dad timing of closing on my mortgage the first week of COVID. And I won’t call out the bank because this doesn’t make them look very good. But it was one of the really big banks, and they couldn’t perform on my mortgage, because the people who knew literally how to send the documents and wire the money, they couldn’t reach them because they had gone remote and they didn’t have anything set up.

And the people who were still working were answering the phone for me, but saying, “I literally don’t know how to wire the money. I’m sorry, you’re going to have to wait until we can bring these people back.” And so that’s an extreme example. But I think we can all relate to this idea of there’s some just really critical knowledge that lives in some people’s heads. And usually it’s your most valuable people who have that info. So they’re probably the busiest. It’s probably the hardest asset. So this was kind of, as you can tell, a problem I got really obsessed with and just sort of sought it time and time again. And so decided to build a software company that could do this automatically, could watch these experts do the thing that they’re great at, send that wire transfer, whatever it might be, and automatically create documentation that you could now use to scale when you’re onboarding someone new, when you’re training a new client, when you’ve changed a process, when you’re buying new software, whatever it might be. Any of these moments where you have to execute on a process in your business, which is every day.

Drew McLellan:

And well, multiple times a day, right? Many, many times a day.

Jennifer Smith:

Multiple times a day. Most of the day, depending on, you’re either sort of doing creative generative work or you’re executing on processes.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and I have to think that now that you’ve been around for a few years and you’re watching how the best of the best are doing some of these things, you’ve spotted some patterns. What we were talking before we hit the record button, the way agencies hire and train has been completely tossed on its head, because agencies were notorious for two things. One, when they hired someone they hired someone super junior because they could afford them. And they knew that having practical expertise in your own agency was sort of hard to beat in terms of the training. And so not only did they hire them young, thinking they would have to groom them and grow them, but two, the way they groomed and grew them was to say, “You know what you’re going to sit next to Babette. Babette is the best account manager at the agency, and you’re going to follow her around and you’re going to learn from her.”

And there was this knowledge transfer by osmosis. They went to meetings together, they overheard conversations. And within six months or a year, this new hire, this kid, was pretty competent at the job because they had observed other competent people. And now to your point, we are scattered across the globe. We are not sitting next to each other. We’re not eavesdropping on each other’s phone calls or going to meetings with each other because a lot of people aren’t going to meetings physically. And we have a lot of agencies that have people back in the office. But nonetheless it’s shifted. Pre COVID, most agencies had a remote employee. Today remote agencies, probably 25% to 50% to 75% of their staff is fully remote, meaning they never come into an office.

Jennifer Smith:

What a wild change.

Drew McLellan:

I know, it’s what’s crazy

Jennifer Smith:

In just short period of time.

Drew McLellan:

Well, I always think it’s fascinating. It’s a change we would’ve never made if we weren’t forced to. I mean some people had sort of played with the model and all of that, but very few people were like, “We’re going 100% remote.”

Jennifer Smith:

And I think what companies are finding now and agencies are finding, the cat’s out of the bag. It’s really hard to put it back in. Employees are now saying, “Well, I’ve been doing my job remotely for the last two years. Why do I have to come back to the office?” I mean, I see it living here in Silicon Valley. A bunch of the big tech companies said, “We’re all going back to the office now.” And employees said, “Ha ha. Not coming.” What are you going to do about it?

Drew McLellan:

So you have that reality of people have been doing their job remotely for a year or longer, and you have the employee crunch, where employees could simply look at their employer and go, “Yeah, I’m not doing that.”

Jennifer Smith:

It was such a tight labor market

Drew McLellan:

Because they knew either the boss would fold or they could find a job tomorrow. So those two things have put agency owners in this very strange vise grip of, “Okay, at some level my people are going to be remote, even if it’s a hybrid situation, I may hire them without ever meeting them, whatever that is. But I have to onboard them, I have to make them feel part of the team. I have to connect the team to this new person and I have to train them.” And so how are people doing that? Well, because honestly I think a lot of agencies are really scratching their head around this.

Jennifer Smith:

And it’s so important to get right. There’s been a bunch of really interesting research on the importance of the first couple weeks in a job in overall employee satisfaction and tenure. And they attribute, you can actually predict with pretty high accuracy, how long an employee’s actually going to stay with you? And if they’re successful based on whether they had a really good experience in those first two to four weeks of getting onboarded to a company. And Gallup studies have said that, I can’t remember what statistics, but companies have spent billions of dollars investing in getting their onboarding strategies. And 74% of employees say their onboarding experience was bad. So there’s this huge disconnect and I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum and companies that we work with everything from, you talk to employees who say, “Hey, I was handed sort of a laptop and a list of people to call.” And they’ve sort of said, “Good luck.” I actually think we’re seeing a lot less of that end of this pendulum because so many companies have woken up and said, “Oh my goodness. Remote onboarding, I have to crack this nut.” And so what I’ve seen is that-

Drew McLellan:

Well, employees are so hard to find that you want to get it right.

Jennifer Smith:

That’s right. The stake stakes are much higher. Because maybe it took you a long time to find that person. Maybe you had to pay a bit more for them than you were comfortable at the time. And so you’re really invested and you want to make it work. And then I’ve seen companies as a result go to the other end of the pendulum where you talk to the hiring manager, the employee, and you say, “How is the onboarding experience?” And they say, “They sent me two weeks’ worth of videos and I sat at my computer and I watched prerecorded videos or Zooms for two weeks.” How to do it? And that was really disengaging too. And so the right answer obviously lives somewhere in the middle, where you’re trying to replicate parts of that apprenticeship experience, which especially when you’re in any kind of creative industry or craft industry. The way you learn your craft historically was by popping your head over, looking over someone’s shoulder and just watching what they were doing, as you were saying, kind of learning osmosis.

So okay, how do you replicate that in an online world? And the answer is you do it in some ways, but you don’t do it in all ways. Because I think one of the… This will be a little maybe surprising to hear from a tech software CEO, but I think sometimes we use technology too much. And what I mean by that is communications technology in particular. So Slack and Zoom and others have done really an incredible job in reducing the barrier to communication. It’s literally one click for you and I to chat right now. We both just clicked on the Zoom link and boom, here we are. We tend to Slack really, really easily. You brought that barrier down to nearly zero. But what that now means is we spend a lot of our time communicating with each other. And there’s been some really interesting research during the pandemic about how much communication increased when we went remote, but it wasn’t a corresponding lifting output, it was just time we spent talking to each other about things.

And that has real consequences. I mean I talk a lot about collaboration overload, and I feel like it’s something we all intuitively hear where you get that Slack ping coming in of someone just asking that maybe it’s that new hire who’s got a question like,” Hey, can you just show me how to do this?” Previously they tap your shoulder, now it’s Slack pings that you’re getting, or a request for a Zoom, that turns into 30 minutes because you exchange pleasantries and it becomes this whole thing, right? And so you can end your day saying, “Oh, I spent a lot of time talking to my colleagues, I talked to that new hire a lot, man, I must have really successfully onboarded them. I must have done good.” But did you actually get your core work done?

Drew McLellan:

Or did you teach them how to do their core work?

Jennifer Smith:

So I think that the areas where I’ve seen companies do this really well is break out the different kinds of things that you’re trying to teach. Either a new employee or someone you’re trying to up level, and for different kinds of knowledge or skills you’re trying to impart, you’ve got different tactics. And so you actually have to be quite intentional about, “Okay, is this a fundamental skill I’m trying to teach them? Is this a piece of knowledge transfer? Is this a process or procedural knowledge?” And those have different channels of communication that you would use. You deliver the message in different timing in different ways.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and even I think about so much of onboarding is about plugging the employee into the culture of the organization and making them feel like it’s a good fit and that they’re welcome and they start to meet people and make connections. And that’s stuff to do remote.

Jennifer Smith:

Yeah, I say there’s three really important questions you have to answer for a new hire. You have to answer the why, the who and the how. The why sort of like, Why is your job important? Why did we hire you? Why does this matter to the company? Why do your efforts matter? And if you’ve done a really good recruiting process, actually someone should show up on day one with a pretty good sense of that why. And you want to make sure that all their kind of interactions with everyone else reinforces that why over and over again. So then I think the next thing that becomes important is that who, and it’s plugging in, just like you said, it’s almost like the API of the company. Who are the different people that you need to go to get different kinds of information? And so when we onboard new folks, we’re kind of half in person.

And when we are onboard people, regardless of where they are, we sort of have a set roster of, “Okay, someone who’s your dedicated boy person who greets you 9:00 AM on Monday, they send you the email on Sunday night telling you what time to show up and what does all the logistics and everything. You already have your lap.” All that kind of good stuff. And then they’ll walk you through, “Okay, here are the set of people that we have set up time for you to talk to. Here’s why these people are important. Here’s what we think might be interesting for you to talk to them about.” So you kind of get that lay of that land and in the first week you end understanding maybe it takes two weeks depending on how big your team is. Who are all the people that I need to know? Now I’m connected and in these people.

And then it becomes how. How do I actually do my job? Okay, you’ve told me what’s important, how do I actually go to do that? And there are different levels of that. Some of that is truly going to have to be apprenticeship. Let’s say you’re trying to teach someone how to manage an account and have an effective client conversation, maybe a difficult conversation with a client. That’s probably something that’s still best done, but a senior person sitting down and explaining to that person, right? Maybe you record a video or something in advance, but it’s really having that person kind of ride along. And so you want to try to replicate in a digital environment what you would do in a personal environment. And that’s where the fact that Zoom and Slack and others make it so easy to keep. But then there’s all the knowledge of like, “Well, how do I actually do those things now?” Right? Oh, I’ve got to go send that invoice to that client and I’ve got to go generate that proposal. I got to do all these other kinds of things. And that’s knowledge before that previously you’d kind of pop your head over and quickly ask someone, well now when those people are sending those one-off Slacks all the time, that is very disruptive. Because there’s a lot of those, that’s very disruptive to the people receiving it on the other side.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and oftentimes agencies are notorious for the, “Glad you’re here. We waited too long to hire you. Here’s your desk. I’m going to send you your email, I’m going to do whatever. By the way, you have a client meeting at 10:00.” And there is no time to do that apprenticeship, especially in today’s market, they’ve looked so long for this person as you said, that they want them to be productive as quickly as possible, but they don’t actually set them up to be productive by throwing them into the deep end of the pool and saying, “I forgot to ask you not to swim.”

Jennifer Smith:

And that’s why I think as much as you can bring stuff into the course of work itself, this is a big kind of theme of mine, think a lot of times when we think about knowledge and training, we think of them as separate activities that you go and do in your spare time at the end of the day or whatever it might be. And instead it’s how do you bring that into the course of your day? Okay, you’re about to have a client call where you’re going to demonstrate this kind of skill. Is there someone on your team that you could invite along just so they could watch and learn? Could you record the video and send it to them later if you don’t want to have them with the client, whatever it might be. But there’s sort of this stream of output as you are doing work where if you bring people along with you, are you able to train them in some way? And that’s what we think about with our software because documentation, writing down what you know how to do used to be the kind of thing that you said, “Hey, can you do this at 6:00 PM on Thursday night after you finish all your real work, and just write down everything so we can put it somewhere for hopefully someone to some look at it someday?”

Drew McLellan:

In a binder, right?

Jennifer Smith:

In a fancy binder, where it probably becomes outdated because you’re moving fast and you’re changing things. You hope someone looks at it someday. And we’ve instead said, “Well, what if we could just watch you as you’re working? And documentation automatically came out the other side, what if it was digital exhaust? It’s just the byproduct of you doing work.” And so the whole idea there is finding these leverage points where you’ve got all of these really valuable knowledge yourself and you almost have to figure out how to scale yourself. It’s interesting concept to think about it that way, but really it’s how do you scale what you know how to do and hand that off to other people, and where can you find those leverage points while you’re doing work where you’re creating that kind of insight.

Drew McLellan:

I’m thinking about the why, the who and the how. So when we look at the why, not only why does your job matter, but why does this company exist? Why do we serve clients the way we do? What are some of the ways you’ve seen people teach that from a distance?

Jennifer Smith:

It starts with the recruiting process. So from the beginning when you’re engaging with someone before they even join, hopefully you’re communicating very clearly, “This is why our agency exists. Here’s what we’re doing, here’s what our clients have to say about us. We’re at this moment in our agency’s journey, we’re growing in these ways and we’re looking to bring someone on to help us do this. And if we do that successfully, that means we’re going to be able to do that. And that means that our clients are going to be happier and are going to be able to accomplish this.” And so from those very early conversations, I would say even the first or second call with a candidate, they should be able to articulate that already because you want them to actually either raise their hand and say, “Yeah, that sounds like something I really want to help with.” Or self-select out and be like, “Nah, not me.

Drew McLellan:

“Not my thing.” Right?

Jennifer Smith:

And you’ve saved your time. So ideally by the time, if you’ve built that into the recruiting process and it’s part of your company culture where everyone they’re talking to is telling a similar story, their own personal story, but through the process, they’re hearing kind of same themes over and over again. “Our agency exists for this reason. This is what we’re proud of, this is what we’re building towards. Here’s how we think that you or someone you could really help us.” Then someone shows up on day one, really fired up about the why.

Drew McLellan:

I agree.

Jennifer Smith:

And then your job just becomes to live up to the thing you said you were going to do. So be truthful during your recruiting process.

Drew McLellan:

That’s right. Right.

Jennifer Smith:

You want to tell the authentic true story.

Drew McLellan:

If you don’t save lives, don’t say you save lives.

Jennifer Smith:

Right. You want someone to really be signing up for what you’re about to do and be bought into it, and then you just want to keep reinforcing that. And the way you do that depends on the company systems and structure. For us, for example, we have all hands every week. That’s pretty common for most companies. We work with some kind of town meaning, and we keep coming back to our values. We keep coming. And one of them is it’s all about user love. And so we have designed our all hands where we talk about our customers and how they’re using our product and how they’re seeing value from it and why that’s important in them. And so that kind of storytelling is just reinforcing our why, and it’s doing it in a very scalable way that is five minutes, 10 minutes a week of our company time. It is reinforcing our purpose.

Drew McLellan:

That everybody is hearing and hearing the same story and hearing the same emotion behind the story.

Jennifer Smith:

And then they start perpetuating it to each other. When I look at our Slack channels, I might not be actively participating in one of them, but now people are talking to each other about user love and like, “Oh wow, here’s this really great story.” Or like, “Great job, you did such an amazing job. Users