Page 161 - Paulisms: Gold Nuggets for Small Business

what I do!’ This is open for mistakes to happen – when training and systems aren’t written down, employees can pick up bad habits and it takes longer to come up to speed. Trainees also may not write things down and your verbal system may not be followed in future because they have nothing to reference. It’s all very loose!
I was strong on systems. I was sometimes annoyed in situations where, for example, you had a new call centre employee start. They would be there for a week, and I would ask, ‘How are you going with your Inbound Telephone Answering System?’ And then the possum eyes would come out, and they would say, ‘What system?’ Then the person training them would look over, those possum eyes would come out again, and they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot about that.’
The important thing is to go back to those principles of systemising everything and creating a franchise; systems cut training times down by two-thirds and people have something to refer to. This enables you to standardise or have the same procedures right across the whole company.