As a caregiver registry owner, you might be knowledgeable in all aspects of operation, but are your administrative team members on the same page?
Ensuring that there is even knowledge exchange—and knowledge that exists outside of your head—is an essential part of making sure that your business can operate smoothly in your absence.
Being a business owner doesn’t mean that you have to do it all. Let’s talk about the power of delegation. We’ll guide you through the benefits of delegation, how to identify tasks that are ripe for delegation, find the right team member(s), and more.
A critical component of business ownership is protecting your time fiercely. This means knowing what tasks play to your strengths and utilizing those strengths in the most effective way: nurturing and growing your business.
One way to assess if something needs to be delegated is by documenting what you do on a weekly basis. Keep a record of what you do and at the end of the week, highlight tasks that are critical and urgent. For other tasks that are recurring, not urgent, and/or non-revenue-generating, put these up for delegation.
If, for example, your core skill set is marketing, but you’re tasked with things like scheduling, or billing, delegate or hire out for these functions so that you can trust that they are being done well—and the same results apply in your absence.
This starts with an audit of your team. Assemble all of your team member information into a spreadsheet, including:
After doing this exercise, you’ll get a sense of not only what your team is—and who is doing what, you’ll get a feel for who is available to learn and do more.
If most of your team members are at capacity and can’t take on additional tasks or responsibilities and do them well, it might be time to hire for a part-time (or even full-time) team member. Before looking externally, search within the list of caregivers you work with if there are any part-time caregivers interested in adding on office hours for a hybrid role or full-time caregivers interested in an office role.
This will show the caregivers you work with that you see the value in their work—and the potential within your business for their career path. It speaks volumes when it comes to your team recruitment and retention efforts.
So, now that you have your team bandwidth together, it’s time to match team members to the right tasks. For team members who have availability, try to pair them with tasks that are most relevant to their role. Or, if they’ve expressed an interest in trying things outside of their day-to-day responsibilities, give that a try.
One of the key factors to freeing up your time as a business owner is being able to detach emotions and feelings from certain tasks. Your contributions and value to your business don’t change, whether you do billing or not, or run payroll, etc.
In contrast, you can empower your team to do more and have a larger impact on your business’s bottom line. This will give them a sense of ownership and leadership on top of feeling more responsible for your registry’s success.
Once you’ve identified the right tasks and the right people to delegate tasks to, here is the most important part: knowledge transfer.
Before training them or sitting down with them, write out the tasks’ processes in a Google Doc or something like it. The important part is getting each part of the process outside of your brain and into a form that is easily shared and understood.
This way, when you sit down with your team member(s) to train them, they can follow along on the document to understand what you do, and, more importantly, how and why you do it.
The see one, do one, teach one, theory comes in handy here. Simply put, you’ll show your team how to do the task one time. Have them do it themselves, and then have them teach the task back to you—or one of their peers (with you in the room to confirm accuracy).
After this exercise, meet with your team member to discuss how the process went. Make sure that they feel comfortable doing the task independently, if they have any questions, etc.
Check in with them regularly (as needed) to confirm that things are still on track, and hold them accountable for the results or task completion as well. And be open to feedback about your processes. Don’t be surprised if they come back with suggestions on how to do this task better, quicker, or more efficiently. That’s the great power of delegation: someone else is doing the task with a different perspective.
Your team is your registry’s greatest asset and competitive differentiator.
By providing your team with the knowledge, software, resources, and tools to work more efficiently and take on more responsibility, you are empowering your team to think like leaders.
Proper delegation is a recipe for innovation, growth, and surpassing KPIs. What tasks are you looking at delegating to your team?