How User Manuals Increase Team Performance

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Admit it.

You’re weird, quirky, and see the world very differently than everyone else.

Which prob explains why you’re a founder building a company.

As your company starts to grow, other weird, quirky (and AWESOME) individuals will board your rocket ship 🚀.

While they are going through your (extremely well designed and EPIC) onboarding program (future blog post) your new colleagues will be excited to learn who they will be working with.

Sure there are team meetings where we learn about each other one fun fact at a time…

AND what if there was a way to quickly establish connection over your shared obsession with ramen noodles or watching youtube videos about home gardening?

What if you could instantly increase the Level of Viral Excitement (Love) within your people?

Enter the User Manual.

A User Manual is a guide that is intended to assist users in using a particular product, service or application. In this context, YOU are the product.

User Manuals help educate people about who YOU are, what your quirks are, how you operate, and may or may not contain some of your obsessions/fun facts.

Through encouraging your team to write a User Manual, you may experience:

Increased levels of Performance through effective communication styles
High levels of Fun and excitement upon discovery over shared interests
Increased Understanding through awareness of each others boundaries and working styles

5 Steps to Implement User Manuals

Below I’ve suggested the steps you can take to raise the Levels of Viral Excitement, or LOVE, to implement User Manuals in your company

Duplicate the below template and share with everyone on your team
Decide the shared set of questions that everyone will answer.

Ensure a healthy mix of questions around mission and vision, working styles, and personal life
Our Template comes with a few suggested questions already

Have everyone write out their responses
Organize a Team-Building Event where people can share their responses
Upload all User Manuals into a shared repository

Every time someone new joins the ship, have 1 step of their onboarding playbook include to write their user manual and then present to the company. Perhaps at the next all-hands or team meeting.

The way this ritual happens will evolve as the company scales.

What are the questions that you would want to see in your User Manual?

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