De-stress Your Business
Business doesn’t need to be stressful. This weekly podcast is for business owners, leaders, and managers who want to get better results, with less stress. We go deep on tactics you can roll out today, such as freeing up 15 hours per week (!) of your time, empowering your teams, and sorting out employee onboarding. Paddy Mann and Alexis Kingsbury are serial entrepreneurs who have learned these lessons the hard way over the last 15 years, and now support 100s of other business leaders as co-founders at AirManual.
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Episodes
Thursday Oct 20, 2022
Thursday Oct 20, 2022
Most software engineers and managers hate documenting.
More than that… they openly distrust that the effort of documenting will ever pay off.
Why is that?
It stems from a misconception on what needs to be documented.
Engineers see beautifully maintained technical documentation and best practice documentation, and assume the goal is to replicate that.
But that’s a fools errand… by the time you’ve documented at that level of detail, you’ve cost the teams weeks of progress, and the content you’ve created is already out of date.
Instead, we need to tie all of our documentation to business processes.
Rather than having a document called “System architecture”, you might need to update your documented peer review process. Or add an “Learn about our architecture” step to the onboarding.
In this episode of De-stress Your Business, we go deep into the false beliefs that can hold back software engineering teams, and how to address them.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Wednesday Oct 19, 2022
Wednesday Oct 19, 2022
How do you deliver employee onboarding that doesn’t suck?
5 guiding principles that make all the difference:
1/ Hold teams accountable for their own onboarding (— HR will only cover the small fraction of onboarding that’s relevant to everyone in the company!)
2/ Get clear on the end goal. We want employees happy and confident in all areas of their role — this is not just about their first few days.
3/ Fix the foundations. You need documented guidance on how tasks are expected to be done in your team. Training without these foundations will be forgotten.
4/ Put the new joiner in the driving seat. A self-service onboarding checklist is a game changer for both the new joiner (who can move at their own pace and never gets blocked) and the team (who free up 100s of hours that would have been spent training/mentoring/fixing mistakes).
5/ Sprinkle on the wow factor. You don’t need a big budget or investment in time — a few little touches like a handwritten note and a personalized gift make a huge impact.
We cover all this and more in this episode of De-stress Your Business.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Tuesday Oct 18, 2022
Tuesday Oct 18, 2022
Most companies do a bad job of employee onboarding.
We want new employees to be excited, motivated, and confident in their new roles…
Yet many lose that excitement as it gets replaced by anxiety, stress and frustration.
Expectations aren’t clear.
Getting up to speed takes forever.
Mistakes are common.
Empowerment diminishes into micromanagement.
Excitement turns into disillusionment.
Of course, it’s not just stressful for the employee.
The manager and team invest a huge amount of time into supporting the new joiner. And other priorities get derailed.
Why is this?
Why does employee onboarding suck in the most companies?
And what can we do about it?
We discuss all this and more in this episode of De-stress Your Business.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Monday Oct 17, 2022
Monday Oct 17, 2022
Documented processes are one of your best tools for reducing business stress.
But if they’re not maintained, they’re worthless.
So how do we stop the rot?
How do we make sure that the investment we make in systemizing our processes pays off in the long-term, as well as the short-term?
That’s our topic on today’s episode of De-stress Your Business.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Friday Oct 14, 2022
Friday Oct 14, 2022
Documentation... a nice idea, but never gets used, right?
When that’s the case, documentation actually slows down your business.
Days, weeks, and months are spent setting up tools and creating documents… that no one uses.
You’re going to need to overcome this hurdle if you want to create a great business.
Documented processes — with your team’s best practices embedded into them — are critical for both removing business stress and unlocking growth.
So… how do we make sure documentation actually gets used??!
That’s our topic for this episode of De-stress Your Business.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Thursday Oct 13, 2022
Thursday Oct 13, 2022
The best way to document your team’s tasks, training and onboarding?
Checklists.
But how do you write a good checklist?
How much detail is needed?
And how do you avoid issues when people actually start using it?
We’re discussing all this and more on today’s episode of De-stress Your Business.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Wednesday Oct 12, 2022
Wednesday Oct 12, 2022
Most employees work out how to get things done by…
… asking their manager
… asking colleagues
… trial and error (and sometimes being corrected)
… a bit of training
… and occasionally finding a useful document in a shared drive
This is broken in so many ways.
The manager and colleagues are constantly being distracted…
Days and weeks are lost making mistakes that could so easily have been avoided…
Training feels great on the day, but quickly gets forgotten…
So what’s the alternative?
Ideally, you want employees to be able to have access to all the guidance they need to excel in their jobs. This allows them to proactively solve their own challenges, avoiding mistakes and distracting their peers.
Training still feels great, but now the lessons are remembered because it’s embedded into the guidance uses on a daily basis.
To make work, you need a pyramid of guidance
The foundations? SOPs and policies. Training goes on top. With onboarding is at the peak.
In today’s episode, we’re discussing why this works so well, and how get started with this approach in your team.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Tuesday Oct 11, 2022
Tuesday Oct 11, 2022
There are 8 reasons why most documentation is doomed to fail:
It’s not obvious where content should go
It’s not focused on your biggest business problems
It takes too long to create
It’s not easy to use
No one’s held accountable for using it
No one’s held accountable for maintaining it
People feel uncomfortable suggesting updates
Your team’s had no training
On today’s episode we’re looking at how those last 4 points will hold you back, and what you can do about it.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Monday Oct 10, 2022
Monday Oct 10, 2022
You've probably tried documenting some of your processes and best practices in the past.
But it’s not worked out…
People ignore the documents.
Mistakes still happen.
The guidance doesn’t get maintained and starts to smell funny.
Why does this always happen?!
As leaders… why do we simultaneously know that documentation is important, and yet push back against it based on past experience?
It turns there are 8 reasons why most documentation is doomed to fail.
Any one issue is enough to cause the whole investment to collapse like a house of cards.
And at most organizations ALL EIGHT issues are present (!!).
In today’s episode, we start looking a what these 8 issues are… and how to avoid them.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Friday Oct 07, 2022
Friday Oct 07, 2022
What should your business do when a major incident happens?
Perhaps your website’s gone offline.
Or your laptop with client data on has been stolen.
Or a team member’s made an offensive post on social media… and the press are covering it!
How can you avoid this being hugely stressful for both you and your team?
How can you get into a position where incidents can happen, but you don’t even to be involved?
We discuss this and more in today’s episode of De-stress Your Business.
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Templates you can use today:
- Incident response process: https://airmanual.link/templates/incident-response-process
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!