How to Setup Your Roles and Responsibilities with Ease

 SUMMARY

Today we are talking about a topic that is very important to a lot of small businesses, even larger ones. Have you ever had frustrations in your small business with a lack of coordination between teams? Maybe it’s not clear who does what. Maybe a certain player is talented and takes advantage of that talent to be doing other people’s jobs. Maybe there are expectations that are not met, players that are simply not up to par with what is expected of them.

I’ve lived these frustrations at Solpak, especially in the early stages. After thinking and doing some research, I realized that there was one tool that would really help me as a business owner. Today, I want to talk to you about the Roles and Responsibilities Master File.

Why is it important to clearly define your roles and responsibilities with this master file?

Clear Vision — You need to list yourself as a small business owner, or team leader and your team needs a clear vision of the organization of the business.

Tool for Growth — This file is important so that you’re well prepared for growth. When you bring in a new hire you need to already have a clear path to their own mission in the business.

A Team that Feels Secure — The Master file will help make your team more secure. They’ll be more comfortable because there are set expectations.

The file that I’m giving you here is an Excel file. This excel file summarizes the teams that define your business. Within each team, you have roles that are clearly specified for the different activities in your business. Each role will have 3 parts.

The 3 Important Parts of Each Role

#1. The Role's Mission  

#2. The Role's Responsibilities  

#3. The Role's Expectations

The Master file is already divided and setup for you with sub-categories. To find out more about how we use this file at Solpak, see the detailed video above. I also want to share a few do’s and don’ts for this tool.

Do’s and Don’ts

• Don’t setup your Master file with a specific person in mind in your team. For example, if Lucy is good with equipment, and she’s in charge of client services, don’t define the role with equipment maintenance, really focus on what the role is supposed to do.
• Don’t spend a lot of time fretting about it. You could do this easily in half an hour where you define the top teams, top roles per team, a one sentence mission, top responsibilities and top expectations.
• Don’t go into too much detail. You might be tempted to go into detail, but just stay high level, especially when you start.
• Do feel like you can involve your team. It would be a great team activity to involve everyone and discuss certain tasks that were maybe never clear. It will trigger a lot of interesting conversations.

Basically, I strongly recommend you download the tool. Do a first run and involve your team, or not. You’ll feel satisfied and start feeling that sense of clarity on how your business should be organized.

FULL TRANSCRIPT [The following is the full transcript of this episode of Small Business Sherpa: The Podcast with David Salerno.]

Hi. My name is David Salerno, I am the founder and owner of Solpak Packaging Solutions, but that's not what I want to talk to you about today. Today, I'm going to put on my Small Business Sherpa hat to talk to you about a topic that is very important to a lot of small businesses, I mean quite frankly, to even larger ones.

Have you ever had frustrations in your team or even your small business with sometimes a lack of coordination between teams? Maybe it's not clear who does what. Maybe a certain player is talented and kind of takes advantage of that talent to be doing other people's job. Maybe there's expectations that are not met, players that are simply not up to par to what's expected of them.

These are really, really, really current and relevant frustrations. I know I've lived them at Solpak, especially the early stages. What happened is back then, after thinking, doing some research, looking at what the best practices were, I realized that there was one tool that would really help me as a business owner, but also my team, really eradicate and get rid of as much as possible of chaos.

Today, I want to talk to you about the Roles and Responsibilities Master File. All right. Before I get on to talk to you about what it is, let's see why is a Roles and Responsibilities Master File so important. First of all, you need to have yourself as a small business owner, or a team leader, and your team needs to have a clear vision of the organization of the business. Really, a high level looking down in on the business and define what is the vision in terms of organization for your business. The second element, it's important to have a master file of roles and responsibilities so that you're well prepared for growth. You probably have frustrations if you've been growing, where last minute you had to hire somebody. They come in, they don't have a clear path to their own mission in the business, it's crumbling, or maybe you were employed and this happened to you. A Master File Roles and Responsibilities, is actually helping you for growth as well.

Finally, that type of tool, is essential and will make your team more secure. They'll be more comfortable, because there are set expectations. There are clear lines of who does what, and it basically renders life so much easier in the business for the team as well. Three reasons why it's important, clear vision, tool for growth, a team that feels secure.

All right. Let's dig in. Before I even show you the actual tool, which is downloadable if you look at the link here below. Let me just cover high level what it's about. The roles and responsibility file is a file, the example I'm going to give you is on Excel. At Solpak we actually use it on Smartsheet, which is a tool that's an online tool, they are different reasons, I won't get into that today.

Today we're going to look at an Excel file. That file summarizes the teams that define your business. Within each team, you have the roles that are clearly specified for the different activities in your business. Finally, each role will have three things that are listed. The first is the roles' mission, the second is the actually responsibilities that are spelled out very clearly, and finally what are the expectations? Remember we talked about frustrations about expectations not being met? Well, this is the third section of the Roles and Responsibilities Master File for role. All right?

What I'm going to do now is, I'm going to dig in, I'm going to pull out the file on the screen, give you Solpak's example, and then that'll be that. I'll give you a few do's and don'ts, and then we're good. Please stick with me, at the end you'll be able to download the file, and use it in your own business.

All right. Okay. Here we are. On the screen here we have the document, and by the way, this is what will be the downloadable version with a tab that will be specially waiting for you, so you can create your own Master File for Roles and Responsibilities for your reality, your business. My goal today is just to cover the highlights of this tool, why each section is important, and that'll be that. Excellent.

The first thing I want to show you, this, we have an Excel file, so roles and responsibilities master. It's divided and already set up for you with sub-categories, and what we have here is the different teams that compose Solpak. In our case, we have three main teams, client relations, dealing with clients, support services, so that's the team that takes care of everything that's behind the scene. Finally, business development. The word says it, that's all about sales and marketing.

When we dig in to one actual team, we look at who composes that team. Today we're going to stick to one team. When you look at client relations, so we have the manager, client relation, so we have a manager Hugues is his name, so you know you have to find who's the contact for each role. So, Hugues is in charge of this. We have a coordinator client services, coordinator shipping and receiving, and technical advisor. This is the team that's actually taking care of clients.

Please know that this is a role. What could happen is we could have a couple of technicians, maybe we have six that are on the road, whatever the case may be, we actually have one role that's defined, but many people could be doing that job. All right. Now let's dig in into one level deeper. All right. We defined our three teams in the case of Solpak. We have the roles within a team, and now for one position we're looking at coordinator client services. The person that's taking care of clients directly one on one.

Three elements that I defined earlier, you have the roles' mission, the responsibilities, and expectations. Now, by the way that documents, because we're in Montreal we use this in french, so I had this document translated just for the purpose of this demonstration. If we look at the roles' mission, you want to define in one sentence, what would summarize why this job even exists to start out with, very important. What is the real mission? If you had nothing else to tell to your team member, what is their real mission? You want to think of a sentence that could be enlightening, and it depends on your industry, but that really triggers, what is your purpose in the business.

In the case of the coordinator, we have, take care of clients, assist them with their requests for orders, service calls, while protecting cash flows with regards to collection and payments. In this case this is very clear. Take care of clients, take care of orders, service calls, cash. That's the purpose. This is how you know, "Am I doing a good job? Yes, this is what I'm there for at Solpak."

The second element is now we list the responsibilities. Responsibilities in this case, I won't go through all of them, you want to list, what are the top 10 to 20 activities for that role? Sometimes it will be a word flow that involves other people, so you really want to think, what are the responsibilities that the coordinator is responsible for?

I'll give you an example, a client calls in for return/exchange, the coordinator takes the call, places it in the system, maybe the technician will be involved in a repair, maybe the shipping and receiving will be involved in shipping a replacement machine. Whatever the case may be, the coordinators responsible for that particular process. You basically list them all. You're able to list the frequency of it. What are the expectations?

When I talk about tool for growth, look at this. You have here the number of hours this represents on a monthly basis, hourly basis. Example, taking calls and orders, 20 hours a month, it's about four hours a week, sorry, and so forth. In the end you're able to plan and budget, we have about a 146 hours for Manon. We know that a full-time job is 150 hours. That gives us an idea that we have a pretty good balance. We review this occasionally.

That's what the tool would be at the responsibilities level. Imagine if you have new employee coming in, we're hiring actually to help Manon with that position, that role, and we already have a list, so when we meet our employee, we have something else called an agreement, a job offer. However, as they look at this, it's crystal clear what they're supposed to do. Don't you want your people in your team to have a crystal clear idea of what is expected of them?

The last thing I want to show you about the positions and agreement, position, is this one here. Expectations. Expectations. The things is, you want to identify three to five top expectations, some of them could be quantified, in the case here, first one, I'll just use the first example, 95% of the calls should be answered within the third ring. 95% should be answered within the third ring. This is very important, so it's clear what the priorities are. If you're living frustrations because you feel you have a player in your team that's not getting it, in terms of what you're wanting to achieve with your business, the clients that are involved and whatnot, this clearly says it.

I used to be super frustrated when I realized that client would call and constantly fall on voice mails. Well, problem solved, now it's the top expectation, because that's part of quality service to our client, and so forth. To summarize, for a role, you have the roles' mission, you define the top 10, 20 responsibilities, and then you define the three to five expectations. It's not a process, or word flow, it's really an expectation, could be quantified, of what would be a good job in that particular role.

That's it, that's the tool. I could go into a little bit more details. We use this also to track changes and processes and whatnot. That will be for another little video. In the meantime, this is really a tool that you should dig in. Let me tell you a few do's and don'ts about this. Assuming that you download the tool, you're all excited, you're like, "You know what? Let me just do a quick half an hour brainstorm, and bring them into the tool, define the teams, what are their roles."

One thing that's important is do not do this as having one person in mind in your team. Example, if Lucy's super good with equipment, and she's in charge of client services, don't define the role with equipment maintenance and whatnot, really focus on what is the role supposed to do. You might have a few surprises. Very important.

The second thing is, you don't want to over fret it either. I mean, this, really easily you could do it, you could do it in half an hour where you define with the tool quickly top teams, top roles per team, one sentence mission, top responsibilities, and top expectations. Don't fret over it, just trust yourself, you know your business well.

Finally, don't go into too much details. You might be tempted to go in details, and then want to break it down even more, or take a task and divide it in six activities, no, just stay high level, especially when you start with that kind of tool. Finally, don't feel shy to involve your team, either do a team activity where you guys all list this, put it up on the board, or do the first draft and then meet your team and have a discussion about, does that make sense?

You will be very pleasantly surprised how your team will be really involved and very interested in discussing maybe certain tasks, were never clear, and were always between two chairs. It's going to trigger a lot of interesting conversations. That's really good for mobilizing your team. All right. Enough about describing the tool.

Basically, I would really strongly recommend that you download the tool. You will have a tab that will be a blank for your own needs. Do a first run, involve your team or not, and just do a quick brain dump. You're going to feel satisfied and start feeling that sense of clarity on how your business should be organized, and just take it from there after.

I hope you enjoyed this session, feel free to visit my Facebook page and like it, or follow it. If you want to get updates on the other future sessions that I'm going to be sending out almost weekly. Keep watching. I have a course coming in the summer. You might want to be advised of that as well. Blahlala. I've talked too much, it's a sign for me to go. Before I go, I want to thank you again for watching and remember that if you have your right path to growth, you have the right tools, you definitely can enjoy your business.