Martin Capeletto
12 min read
We compiled a list of tools on how to Organize your Small Business properly. We got those Tips from our experience and research on how our customers are improving their organizations by using MyLenio.
The list is not in any order of importance, but it should be a good starting point on how to start doing things better than you can start implementing now.
Other employees start creating other Spreadsheets with different things to track. When someone joins or leaves your Company, there's no clear place where all these documents live, and keeping them up to date is almost impossible. The result is a lot of potentially useful documents that are worthless because they are not updated properly.
A better solution is to use a system that will track all of your employees and generate these reports in real-time when needed. For example, having a system to track your training and documents, having a unified directory of people with all their proper data, etc. The system will then keep track of everything that's going on and the current status and allow you to export reports on Excel that are always up to date, and that way, you don't need to update them every time.
MyLenio implements all this (among other things) and allows you to quickly access all this information in a single source for the information. You can start a 90-day free trial.
Implementing a Training Program for your Company has many benefits, including training new employees on security, having them know how things are done in your Company and allowing them to be more effective from the beginning. Time invested in developing a Training Program is money well spent because it will reduce problems in the future and speed things up considerably from the beginning.
When someone joins your Company, the first impressions are super important, and having a solid Training program will allow you to have the new employee ready to work as soon as possible, but most importantly, you'll be able to show him the culture of the Company and make sure they can adapt fast to this new environment.
Also, a Training Program is an essential part of any certification or compliance you might need in the future. Any Training Program should track all the Training done by your team, assign them tests, and renew them periodically.
You can learn more about how to create a Training Program in MyLenio.
If you're still having everyone sign all Documents on paper, you have some important improvements to make. Digital Signing, or at least going paperless, will make a huge difference for your Small Business and save you a lot of time.
Having a system in place for all documents to be sent to anyone in your team is super important in organizing a Company. This should always include assigning the documents, keeping track of who signed and who didn't, and an easy way to know what needs to be done.
By working with a system that helps organize and send your documents, you'll reduce many manual tasks done almost daily as your team grows.
You can learn more about how to Go Paperless with MyLenio.
As a Small Business Owner, it is normal to be taken care of those small but tedious tasks daily.
When someone new joins your Company, you have to create an account for them in gSuite, Slack, Jira, GitHub, etc. After that, you need to start adding that new user to different Drives in gSuite, adding him to some Slack Channels, giving him the proper access to your GitHub Repositories, and this goes on and on.
Things get even more complicated as you start moving people around in your Teams. Let say User A now has to go to another team. Now you need to remove all accesses from his old team and add him to this new team's resources.
This approach doesn't scale and takes a lot of time. What we found that usually happens is that most new users never get access to everything they need. And when moving members inside the Company, they never get those old accesses removed. The problems on this are critical on a security and compliance level, but this also creates big problems for your Organization because People usually don't know all the available resources. They have to ask other people where the GitHub repository is located, what Jira Board are we using for this Project, etc.
You can learn more about how to get this done in MyLenio with Automatic Permissions
At the beginning of your Small Business, there is no need to model your Processes formally. You do most of the things the way you can, which is totally fine, but as you want to grow or start working on a certification or compliance it's important to have well-defined processes.
Modeling your processes sounds harder than it actually is. You basically need to describe which steps each process has, who is the person in charge of doing it, and how it should be done. We recommend starting an exercise where you try to write all the process that exists in the company as a draft. You'll be surprised to see how good you'll feel when you start writing those down. The easiest place to start is your onboarding flow.
As always, gathering the information is not the most difficult part of it, but ensuring those processes are being followed on time and that no one is skipping any part is where it gets tricky. You can do multiple hacks with Spreadsheets, creating Wikis, or other documents that will quickly become outdated, and tracking all this information is almost impossible.
MyLenio provides a system where you can model your processes into Flows, assign each step to someone on your team, and keep track of everything on your company with beautiful dashboards. You can even schedule recurring flows that repeat every month or so.
You can learn more about how to Model your Processes into Flows with MyLenio.
If you don't currently have a User Directory for your Company, please start making one! This is fundamental and will be the basis of everything you do over time. Most small businesses have Google gSuite or Microsoft Office 365, which is a good first step, but most companies don't have their employee information in this Directory.
As a first step, make sure you're using gSuite or Office 365. They provide you with a Directory to save all this information. Then, make sure everyone on your Team has an account. Finally, fill in all the information you have like Name, Address, Personal Phone, Emergency Contact, Department, Manager, ID, and others.
Once you have all this information, make it part of your processes that every time someone joins your Company, you'll add this information. This will be your primary source of truth and information in your Company and should be done properly.
MyLenio helps you with this. We connect to Google gSuite and Microsoft Office 365 and sync all the information you configure for your employees directly into that directory. This means the data belongs to you and is safe on their systems. From MyLenio, you can add new users, edit all their information, and take care of gSuite and Office 365 automatically for you.
You can learn more about how to have a Single User Directory with MyLenio
Another easy thing to forget to do when you're managing your Small Business is to keep track of all your company's physical assets. This can be from Computers, Monitors, RSA Keys, or any other thing you own. Although this sounds trivial, most small companies don't do a good job.
On this one, there are no silver bullets. Tracking this information is really important and has to be done. You can keep track of this in Spreadsheets or any other place you consider.
We believe that having everything organized under the same platform has huge advantages. In MyLenio, you can create an asset, assign it to your Team, track all the changes done over time, and be sure that you don't miss anything.
You can learn more about how to Track your Inventory with MyLenio
One thing that's key is to have clearly defined your Benefits & Perks for your Employees. It's normal that as the organization grows, you'll start providing more Benefits. Still, it's also normal that most people are not even aware of their benefits because there's no single repository for them to look at.
As with most things in this list of tips, gathering the information is only the first step. You need a system where you can load these benefits and assign and request them to be effective. Not doing this will create more problems over time and will take a lot of your time.
In MyLenio, we allow you to assign Benefits & Perks per country to configure those easily. Everyone will be able to see the benefits and request them, everything under the same platform.
You can learn more about how to model your Benefits & Perks with MyLenio
Team engagement is crucial for any small business's success. When the team is small, this is usually not a problem because everyone works together on the same things and recognitions flow naturally. As your team grows, or if you have many people working remotely, having a way to recognize teammates becomes really useful.
There are many tools to provide Recognition to the team. The problem with those tools is that they are not part of an integrated system where everything happens. This becomes a problem with managing licenses, ensuring everyone has an account and ensuring everyone knows where to check those recognitions.
MyLenio provides all this integrated into its platform. Anyone in your team can give recognitions. Those will be sent in an email to your company or posted on a Slack Channel if configured. You can also check on our dashboards, which are getting more recognition, and get really useful metrics on your team.
You can learn more about how to get Recognition with MyLenio.
Another typical place where you can save time and get properly organized is in how people are requesting vacations and other requests. When the company is small, a simple message to you is fine, then you communicate with the people that needed to know about this, and that's all. But of course, this doesn't scale.
You need a system where people can Self-Service and request everything they need. This again can be from Vacation Requests to Reimbursement for travel, Plane Tickets, etc., etc. To be clear, people sending emails to your company about this is not a system. It can work initially, but as you grow, it becomes impossible to keep track of everything, and your team has a horrible experience dealing with those requests.
MyLenio again provides a system for this. You can configure everything people can request. You configure the approval flow (let say first the Manager, then HR, then Accounting) for each of these requests, and as always, you can keep track of everything on our dashboards to be sure every request made has been completed.
You can learn more about how to model your Vacations Request with MyLenio
What many people overlook when trying to streamline your business is having a consistent process from Recruiting Candidates and interviewing them to the actual onboarding of your Company. While having a consistent process might take more time initially, it will provide a lot of value in the long term by not worrying about it and, most importantly, making the best first impressions to the hard to acquire talent.
Creating a proper system for this is not an easy task because it usually involves several people in your Company, like everything described in this article. Any system you choose should allow you to create a consistent experience that can be traced and executed multiple times with similar results.
MyLenio provides many tools that work nicely together to Achieve this, from the Recruitment module where all candidates can be tracked, with the ability to send offers directly in the system, to configure the onboarding steps each new employee will need to perform.
You can learn more about how to do Recruitment with MyLenio
The final tip we have will depend on the type of business you are running and seems obvious enough but is hard to achieve. The more you can automate and have a system monitor how things are going in the company, the more time you'll have to take care of your job's most important things.
As always, the first step is gathering information. What can be automated? For this, we found that taking notes of all the small things you've done during a 2 week period works really well. You can compare these notes with other managers in your Company to find patterns. Once you identified a few patterns, there's always some low-hanging fruit you can take care of. We recommend not changing everything at once since change takes time, even in small businesses.
Of course, MyLenio has many tools to get this done, from Automatic Permission provisioning to recurring triggers for Flows, Documents, Training, and Tasks. Notifications to everyone that needs to do something and dashboards showing a 360 view of your Company
You can learn more about how to Automate your Company with MyLenio
If you think MyLenio can help with any of those, don't wait and start your Free 90-day trial.
