In this conversation, Jim and Jeremy discuss the challenges small business owners face in managing HR without a dedicated department. They emphasize the importance of effective onboarding, the role of automation and AI tools in streamlining processes, and the need for consistency in training. The discussion also covers the creation of employee handbooks and standard operating procedures (SOPs), as well as the significance of real-time support for employees. Various tools like Scribe and Waybook are highlighted for their effectiveness in onboarding and continuous learning.
When the new employees started at the company, he was excited to hear that they had an unlimited vacation policy. He asked his coworker, so how much vacation do people usually take? And the coworker replied, the first five minutes of every meeting.
00:00 The Challenge of Unlimited Vacation Policies
01:49 Navigating HR in Small Businesses
03:54 The Role of Automation in Onboarding
06:42 Creating a Consistent Onboarding Experience
09:33 Building Employee Handbooks and SOPs
12:55 Real-Time HR Support for Employees
15:48 The Importance of Automation in Emergencies
19:43 Tools for Effective Onboarding
22:55 Leveraging AI for Personalized Learning Paths
25:31 The Future of HR Tools and Employee Engagement
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We're back. It's already funny. When the new employees started at the company, he was excited to hear that they had an unlimited vacation policy. He asked his coworker, so how much vacation do people usually take? And the coworker replied, the first five minutes of every meeting.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like that's like a Ziggy. feel like that's very specific like cartoon kind of a no. Now who's dating them? So did I get one notch too specific? How about a Ziggy reference, by the way? my gosh. That's your best. That was our That was best and final answer. That was the best of
I think that was the best of all six episodes so far. It wasn't a knock-knock joke. That's why. I didn't have to participate in it, which is good. Thank you. It's like a little mini vacation for me, too. That's right. This is AI Made Easy for Business. Talking about vacation policy. HR for small business owners.
Is a struggle because there's no HR. It's not like a big corporation. There's no HR department. There's no big There's not even a point person usually right? It's usually the business owner generally right just handling when we say HR like anything human resources related so hiring terminating disciplinary actions, but also training onboarding is so on board. It's so critical and anybody who has made a hire
for their business, you've gone from just yourself to your first employee or you're a manager in a small business and you have a team that you need to add headcount to. It is one thing to find a good candidate and to make them a job offer, but then the real work begins because you have to figure out how am I going to carve out.
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Hours out of my day or days in order to provide someone with training so that way they're they're going to be effective You can't just hire somebody you have to then you know help them get get into their job and a lot of times, you know again we talk about traditional employees, but whether they're full-time part-time or Contract workers gig workers, which obviously is going to just keep getting more and more prevalent for every size business Whatever it is people talk about internships or apprentices
Whatever it is, they have to be coordinated. And I don't care if it's a for-profit, nonprofit, large, small. In particular, though, when it's a smaller business, it's a struggle. throwing people at a problem doesn't always make it easier or better for the business or the business owner. If onboarding is not good and ongoing.
training and so on isn't good, then it really can be a major struggle. So there was an article that it's actually based on the Journal of Information Management Insights, which clearly is something I read every day. But actually it was in Science Direct. It was on a blog. Also something you read every day? No, it's blog. Online I do, yeah. As I'm scrolling, instead of doom scrolling, I do that. Well, I would rather you read Science Direct.
Science daily and any of the science, you know online rags. I love that about you you were going deep That's so anyway, they picked up because I knew you know, we were concerned about what's the day? Where's the data backing this up? But they picked up on an actual study which was nice to see but they basically just touched on The automation of administrative tasks. Yeah, we know it's here because you're seeing it from larger corporations already You putting this automation in for these administrative tasks in particular for HR
And it allows, especially for the onboarding process, right? It allows the streamline of the intake forms, the initial pass or review of resumes and qualifications and whether they tick the right boxes. And it begins to streamline a lot of that. But it also allows the HR staff, or in this case, the business owner, right? Chances are, if it's a small and medium sized business owner, it allows them to free up more time for more strategic things, thinking a little broader. And also,
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doing that one-on-one time that AI can't replace and tools and digital tools can't replace. But it's that personalized training that I like. And that's specifically touched on the idea of customized learning in different languages. So now if you have multiple languages spoken by your staff, let's say it's been in a kitchen environment, in a restaurant, multiple languages spoken, trying to not just train the staff, but any changes that ongoing
professional development for the staff that's there as well and helping them continue to grow and evolve. Let's say if the recipes change or the menu changes or there's a new better way of doing something or a new piece of equipment or so on. It doesn't just help with onboarding. It clearly can do that in a lot of ways. A lot of these AI tools can and it can certainly provide easier ways for recruitment and awareness and so on and streamlining the processes of intake.
and the initial onboarding, but it can also help with ongoing training. And again, that can be done since everybody learns differently. It can be done in more automated ways now where it's done once because the language is written once that the, the protocols written once. And then at that point it gets folded in. It's part of your, your brain, your institutional knowledge, not just in the owner's mind, but now a digital version of that, which now could be used for managers or the individual employees to start to train, learn.
grow in any language they want written spoken because again, there's sometimes you know for some of these types of jobs Ranges, but people learn everyone learns differently So it might be the written word the spoken word or some sort of video component and all that can be done now and created in a pretty spectacularly easy way relative to what was done before and you would have had to have a large-scale big corporation to do that before with a video crew and editors and all these other things and then language translators and
Producers and all that and you don't need all of that anymore to do these sorts of things now There's a couple of angles that that I wanted to focus on and I know that you know you when we were talking about this before you were talking you were thinking a lot about business owner and How to do this once so that way the business owner doesn't have to do it again and again again and I think that's that alone is tremendous value but I
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Wanted to put on my employee hat and also think about this from the point of view of employees not just for retention which is obviously critical, but Just thinking about the culture of creating a good experience when you're on board on boarding a new employee obviously the the The first thing that comes to my mind is consistency Anybody who owns a small business anybody who is a manager in a business is?
you know, small medium sized businesses being pulled in a million different directions. And when I'm not on my 100 % A game and I'm working with a new hire, I'm going to feel bad if I give them a less than stellar onboarding experience. So when I'm organized, when I'm thoughtful, if I'm going to invest the time in hiring and bringing a new employee on, I want to give them a great first experience right from the start.
If I'm being pulled in a million different directions answering the phone doing all of the things while I'm giving them training in those Baseline tasks. I'm not doing them The service that I really I'm not being the best version of myself, right? So if I can actually take the time When it's not those busy moments throughout the course of the day do it at night do it on a weekend morning or do it early before the staff gets in and just take the time think through what are the
basic fundamentals of the job, plot out an onboarding course for that role. mean, there's general things that everybody needs to know, and then there are things specific to a role. If I can think just what are the general things that everybody needs to know first and then build that course. And once I have the course content, that's where AI can actually really shine because sure, we want to provide courseware for onboarding and do this so that there's some consistency, but with
Transcribed content with company faqs with content now plugged into an AI engine The employee can ask questions sure of me as the owner or manager But the employee can ask questions of the content and get answers out and I love all that and I'm gonna almost even step back one step away from that right one step further back and that's to say look most small business owners and Just don't have an employee handbook
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They don't have or and if they do it's from 20 years ago. It was never updated, right? They don't have standard operating procedures They don't have processes kind of mapped out and that's not an insult like that's I'm one of them Like I don't I don't do that Should we yeah and more and more now we're folding it in so these tools start to do that for you with you I should say and they lay the foundation now for these rules regulations up standard operating procedures and also just
ethical standards that might be required and so on, privacy and things of that nature. All of that gets built in now and you can use AI tools to help write that immediately almost. almost immediately. If you just have a bullet list of like here's opening and closing procedures checklist, great. That's a start. If you have fold that in and now let's turn that into something with more depth. If you have basic like rules of conduct, great. Fold that in. If there's basic steps for how to
Schedule yourself, you know or get scheduled or make changes to the schedule if you fold that in Everyone has something usually it's written down or typed up or in emails And we copy and paste a lot in this case this get let's you know One of the tools that we'd suggest to get started with is just collect it all together in one spot Yeah, and start to feed it in to some language models that can then help you Build out your own
employee handbook, standard operating procedures, and then start to develop some of these other tools for onboarding that now give you that customizable, very personalized approach for each particular role and employee, getting them to hopefully now respond better and get more buy-in and then getting freeing up your time to be able to have more one-on-one personal time with them. And I made this in a passing comment, but I just want to reinforce it. Once you have all of these content modules,
whether that's video content or if it's just text that you've, your employee handbook, you really shouldn't spend a ton of time on this because all you really need to do is just going back to prompt engineering, engineer a decent prompt, let CheckCheap ET do the work for you, refine. All these tools should provide you with the first draft. You don't have to sit down and think hard about what needs to be included. One of the key things I think that is an underutilized aspect of this is
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tone of voice. You know, if you don't want a large tone and nobody wants a large tone for an employee handbook, especially for a small business. Right. So just tell the prompt, keep it brief and keep it conversational, keep it light. And in some cases for corporate culture or business culture, keep it a little fun, right? Like, you know, we have a client that's in a very fun industry and so we're going to keep that very light. It's more entertainment oriented and lighter. They're very professional and very
They run a tight ship, but they want that both, they want that conversational lighthearted tone for their, even for serious stuff, for their customers, but they also want it for their employees, so it's baked into their culture. My wife says this all the time about teaching with our kids. The brain loves fun. So if you can make a task more fun, then you're gonna remember it. And I think an employee handbook is inherently not fun. Terrible. But if we can take it, we can make the tone a little bit more lighthearted.
even if it has professionalized content in it, now we take all of those components, the training modules, employee handbook, any other documentation, plug that in as our SLM into a chat bot, now what we have also is an opportunity for employees to be able to ask questions of your content. That's where I wanted to go next, and I'm glad you brought it up, and that's that real-time support, HR support in particular, for the employees. So let's say it's 2 a.m., and they have an issue, and you're, you,
Boss slash owner are also the HR director and now you're to get a 2 a.m. Call or text. What if that could be answered because it's something simple like hey I have to call out. What do I do? Yeah, I'm not going to make the shift at whatever. What do I do? Well link it up to hopefully have a schedule maybe now linked to that and now link it up to maybe the contact for the other people on the team to ping them to see who can
slide in that isn't already scheduled for one of the other locations or maybe move two people or another location that you own, move one of them and so on. Those are the source of things that can be done in an automated way. Or again, it might be more technical question like, I cut myself during, you you'd hope they call, but I cut myself or injured myself on the job doing something. What, what do I need to do? Great. Here's what you do. Fill out the incident report immediately. Take care of yourself, fill out an incident report or have your manager do it and do X, Y, and Z. That can be all done now in an automated chat bot type.
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We talk about these chatbots, but they're basically just conversational ways both verbally or in written form or whatever To be able to interact with people and not in a press one press to press three kind of environment And I always stress that because whether it's for customer service We all hate that right the the offshoring that was done and the automation of customer service But employees would hate that too, right? Especially for larger corporations for a smaller corporation or a smaller company. They're gonna want that personalized
But they're also gonna want to know especially younger generation. They don't really want to pick up the phone. They don't want the text They'd rather have something a little more interactive think about the weighting of these things too Like when I say wait, I mean like the value weighted for each of these, Calibrations of what is it that people want right? So yeah, I mean we think I'd love to get a real human but the problem with real humans are we're inconsistent You just actually made a really interesting point if you've cut yourself
And you're calling work while you're bleeding. And by the way, this is a real story. This stuff happens. I've lived it. And you're the, you're the owner, you know, maybe they reach you, maybe they don't. You're it's after hours or it's before hours. The first thing that the automation should do is say, Hey, get some medical help and tell them you were injured on the job. And by the way, let, give them the company name and this contact info. So this is, this is something where.
having the availability with a competent response is infinitely better than having a live human being on the other end of the line. And you can train the AI responses to prioritize, to weight certain things in a medical emergency, call 911. That's the first thing that it should say. Or maybe it's not an emergency, but it's definitely something, and maybe to go to an urgent care center too. Okay, we can't necessarily program that all in.
But if there are three urgent care centers close by and we pinpoint who they are great. If we don't, we just want to let that go to the web and go to, know, and be able to respond and say, okay, where are you located? I'm located here. Great. Here are the three options. This one's the closest and you know, maybe they ultimately someday have a wait times and so on posted, which some of them do. Then you can know where to send them. But in this case, you know, if it's an emergency, obviously we'd want them going to the emergency room. If it's something minor or if it's a,
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not medically related, you know, cause again, we got down that road, but same, same. We don't even have to say, let's just take the emergency situation out of this. If you're a new employee and this is your first week on the job and you're saying, where do I log my time? Right. Yep. Now it's after hours. I had to stay late because I'm new and I'm just learning and I want to do a good job. And I'm asking these, the question, but my manager has left for the day. and I asked,
Where do I log my time?
bots can be programmed to ask in response, are you in this role? Are you a full-time employee? Are you contract? Are you working? You know, if it's manufacturing, am I back in the warehouse? I might have two different systems at my office where I log my time based upon what type of employee I am. And it can be programmed to give again, that waiting based upon the response based upon the role that have. another thing could be something again, as simple as we talk about onboarding and training, but
back to training or back to like real time response to things that occur all the time. You know, gift cards or rewards, you know, gift cards are always a gift certificates are always the torture for small businesses, right? Because there are various systems over the years and you might have some from three systems ago that could land at your place and so on. Right. I deal with it all the time and you, I'm sure you have as well with loyalty programs and so on. Someone comes in with an old gift card, tried to get red, can't get red. Yeah.
customer comes in, let's say it's a retail store or a restaurant, that customer just wants to know what's on it and use it. They don't want to hear the old system and we don't know. They don't want any of that. The employee now is frozen. They don't know what to do. So you're going to call a manager. It's nine o'clock at night over that. Probably not. You shouldn't. mean, but you do need to respond. Imagine if there was a very simple way that they could prompt it and ask and get that response back to know, okay, yeah, actually we have a
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We have a book or there's a spreadsheet for that and or there's a separate tool go to this old device It's still hooked up and ring up that old gift card. I might be documenting SOP standard operating procedures SOPs that once you've documented at one time and usually there's again an owner has that in their head I know or a good manager right knows I know how I would do that and that's why they always get called This starts to eliminate the need for those calls, but it does take hard work
the upfront work of downloading your brain. was just doing that before this. We shot this right with one of my companies. You saw me, I had a bunch of people on the phones and we were on a call and I was shooting them off, you know, uploading documents for a launch that we're doing for one of my companies. And it was to do a brain dump and get all my data and information out to them so they could sort it, organize it, get it ready for the new AI tools we're folding in for this particular, it's a real estate management company and
But if I don't get that out of me and my mind and create SOPs or at least get the data together to be able to have someone create those SOPs, then there's no next step to automate. And so I know we're talking on the onboarding side and not on the customer side, but on the onboarding side. But that infrastructure is so important because again, without these SOPs built in, all the automation in the world isn't going to matter if the processes aren't done.
right from the start. And the first step in that is getting some of that data and getting then the insight from that data to be able to have the employees be able to take the next step, get onboarded, get trained, but then also have questions and get those questions answered quickly and easily and get the right answers consistently. It's critical. So when come back, let's talk about some tools.
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So there are so many tools out there, obviously, for all of these different things, not just as it relates to HR, but just in general for every business idea, concept, need, issue you're having, there's some kind of tool, whether they're really AI based or not, there's just a lot of tools out there, right? And exponentially more every day, right? We could see that because right now we could whip up a tool in five seconds using some, you know, using AI to do it.
to solve almost any problem. So if we can do that, we know there are minds that are even smarter than ours and teams much bigger that can do that too. As it relates to HR and let's say onboarding and specifically and maybe from there and SOPs, like you have a couple good examples here, some I'm familiar with but a couple that I'm not. So when I start looking at tools for the purposes of onboarding, one tool that I've been using a lot recently is Scribe. And it basically does something better, I think, than screen recording.
which is it takes screenshots of every single click as you're narrating records the audio, transcribes it, puts the whole thing together into a step-by-step process. And by the way, I'm not just using this with clients. I'm using this with my mom, who I love. She's in her 60s. She's fantastically curious about technology. She has tons of questions. Jeremy, how do I do this or this or that?
If I took five minutes out of every day and called my mom or called her back when she calls me to ask me a tech question, I'd spend all day talking to my mom, which by the way would be a lot of fun because I love my mom, but I wouldn't be working. You'd be very mad at me if I just spoke to my mom. No time for podcasting or anything else that we do. And so instead I just take literally 30 seconds, turn on Scribe, record my screen and create an SOP for my mom. And it's fantastic. And if I can do that for my mom who
let's face it, she's technology curious, she's not a Luddite, she's not afraid of this stuff, and if it works for her, I promise it will work for anybody. So that is really helpful, especially as it relates to things that are computer driven, right? important to know there are other layers, we're not, anytime we'll bring up an example, just know that we know that.
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Every business is unique. Which leads me to the second tool that I wanted to offer. I figured. But wait, there's more. There is. So I also looked at one called Waybook. And Waybook is about creating personalized learning paths. And I've heard of that one, but I've never used it. It does continuous learning as well. So I like that part of it. It's not just about the onboarding, but then you can also create job aids and guides and other.
If somebody wants to change roles into a new role or gets promoted, you can create more documents. And it tracks the progress. It does. Right. Which is important for promotions or raises and bonuses. It does also provide some collaboration tools. So as you're working on a help doc or you're, if I found an employee and I'm working through a piece of training, I can then collaborate with my manager. much is AI driven in this? Like how much have they folded in?
Themselves or how much would you say would still have to be integrated or tied to a three API and so the AI piece is pretty new in their software They did the right thing first. This is this is the thing that I think is so essential for any AI technology regardless of the niche right is making the AI Conversational around the content. Okay, and honestly if all the AIs just started with that, right? It would be a huge win. So in this case with with we talked about earlier in the
conversation today we talked about building a knowledge base, creating documentation and then programming a chat bot. They've done that for you. So this way, if I'm an employee and I've just taken all this training or there's a knowledge base or job aids.
I can conversationally ask questions and get the answers. I so here's the, here's the thing, cause this might not be the sexiest, coolest, most exciting topic. And we, we cover a lot of that ground. You just lost every HR person out there. Cause I said sexy, cool and exit. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. No, but really we, we cover a lot of that ground, not just in this podcast, but with what we do every day with businesses, because that's the part that creates usually the most friction frustration. It always gets dumped to the bottom of the list.
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But also it's why employee turnover is so high and why it makes it harder ultimately on business owners or business managers to, to run and scale their businesses. Cause that's where a lot of businesses kind of go wrong, where it's all held in that business owners mind or that great leader or managers mind and the visions there and the hopes and dreams and ambitions are there and the hard work is there as well. But the systems and the process are usually what's lacking and that this is an example.
very specific example for HR and onboarding, but it's meant to really hopefully highlight that there are not just tools out there, but AI tools and integrations right now, plus the ones that are keep coming every day that are going to continue to make that achievable, even the hardest or most annoying parts of business. One more sexy component to this, if you will, is that it will also make suggestions. So if you're missing things or things that it thinks you should, you know,
be including in your onboarding tools. The conversational aspect isn't just for the employees, but it's also for you as the owner manager, content creator, giving you guidance to help you create better documentation. It's so important because while I don't like or excel in the area of creating SOPs, I have a lot of feedback on them. I'll know if it's right or wrong if I'm reading it and someone else is proposing it. vouch for that. Yeah, I was going to say a little bit. Because I don't love.
doing it and I don't naturally excel in that area. I have an appreciation for people who can do it. And I also usually try and have those people around me in this case. just want all the HR people back. Well, that's the idea, right? I give them a little love because they never get any love by the way. They're the first people fired by the way, always first people, right? What's the first department that gets whacked in downsizing? Well, I mean marketing, but I mean,
which makes no sense. But I mean, maybe now because so much of it's being automated. But in the case of HR, unfortunately, again, since most of these small businesses don't have an HR department or even HR director or point person, it's falling on them. And again, it's always falling to the bottom of the list. The fact that now that interaction can happen and employees and also the owner or the manager of the business can now have someone to bounce things off of because
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That's where you don't want to go to a lawyer. I get asked a lot of HR questions. Like, what do you think, what would you do in this scenario, Jim? Even if I'm not in their industry or I'm like, well, you run a great business. I'm like, yeah, but we've never had the scenario and we don't want to call our lawyer because they're going to give us bad advice. I'm like, well, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not your accountant. And I'm certainly not an HR expert or a labor attorney. But where do they turn? And it's kind like what we feel about AI in general. Where do people turn? They turn to us. Fine. Where do you turn for HR? Now you'll have tools to help.
work through a lot of that with you. The final thing I wanted to mention about some of these tools, it's not just the last one I mentioned, find a tool that will allow you to use the platform as a framework and will also allow you to delegate content creation to your other employees as an owner, as a manager. Look, I I love talking with you. do this podcast and I think the banter is fun and funny, but if it were just one of us or just the other, like,
it wouldn't be as interesting, but also in the company setting, nobody wants to hear from the owner all day long. So delegating that to other employees so that way they can contribute content not only takes the burden off of you, but also gives them an opportunity to participate and share their unique point of view and experiences and having an AI counterpart for them. Maybe they've never done this kind of a thing before. It will give them feedback. It will help coach them through the process.
and help make sure that they talk about all the things that are needed for a particular SOP or cultural touch point or process. The main takeaway from all this is just that you're not alone and that almost every business owner faces this. And before a lot of these tools were readily available and fairly cost effective and easy.
You would have had to struggle on your own or hire or bring in people right and pay a lot of money in this case You can do it in a much more cost-effective faster better way and at your rhythm and your pace That'll be better for your employees. So take it on absolutely go
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you