In today’s busy work environment, most micro business owners scarcely find time to keep up-to-date with some of their administrative and compliance work.

One very important document that any business must have are workplace procedures documents. A solo-preneur or a couple working together may not worry about this too much in the beginning, but there will be times when you will need to take relatively long periods of time away from work and you will need to train someone else to do the work you’ve been doing. Or simply, you may need to employ extra staff to help you out in your business.

In any case, proper training of new staff is important to ensure your clients get the same quality of service and experience that they expect from you.

Some business owners find the process of documenting their workplace or task procedures a very tedious and time consuming activity. They rely on just showing their new staff the processes and hope they learn everything relatively quickly.

The problem with this is that either the staff keeps coming back to them to ask questions which take up a lot of their time or the new staff relies on their memory and makes errors which could cost the business more headache, time and money than if they took the time to document workplace procedures that the staff could follow.

So how do you document your workplace procedures and not have to spend the time typing or writing them down?

Here are 2 other methods of documenting workplace procedures you may find better for you:

1. Take a video camera and record yourself (or have someone record you) as you are showing someone how to do the work. This way, you only do it once and the recording can be used over and over again for training.

This is a great option that can be more effective than a written document because there can be no misinterpretation of your instructions if you are showing them as well as telling them how to do things.

2. If you don’t like being on a video (and some people don’t), record your instructions on a voice recorder. Some digital cameras have voice only recording features. You can also download a free software that allows you to record voice through a microphone attached to your computer.

We use a software called Audacity which is great for recording and editing sounds. The best part is it’s free. If you want to try it out, here’s the link to their website from where you can download it.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

So there they are. Two tips to help you save time as you document workplace procedures.

Happy recording!