Creating a training plan for your office going paperless

1. Identify what new technology your office will be using

This guide to creating a training plan for your office to go paperless assumes that you already have a plan in place to convert your paper forms to digital, if you haven’t already, I recommend taking a look at our guide to going paperless for offices.

As part of going paperless, you will likely have a new app, software, or hardware that your team will need to start using instead of their old paper-based approach which will form the main focus of your training plan.

2. Create a set of training objectives

What do you want your team to get out of this training plan? Your training objectives identify the end result you want from your training plan, since the core purpose of the training plan is to support your team in going paperless, your objectives will likely be closely related to that and the new paperless technology. You objectives could look something like:

• My admin team will know how to use Xero, our new accounting software for handling invoices and receipts.
• My implementation team will know to use Locale Central, our new data collection app that replaces our paper forms.

These objectives assume your team would be learning a whole new technology, but you may instead just be teaching them how to carry out a new set of tasks on the software they are already familiar with.

3. Break down your training objectives into business processes

The next step is to deconstruct your training objectives into the individual business processes your team needs to learn to meet your training objectives. For example, if your objective is for your team to learn how to use Xero, your business processes may look like:

• Scanning business receipts into Xero.
• Creating a new invoice in Xero.
• Emailing an account statement to a customer in Xero.

Your list of business processes should cover each new activity you expect your team to do on an ongoing basis as part of your transition to a paperless office.

4. Design and implement your training plan

For the final stage of your training plan, design the “course material”, and implement it, using the previous information you noted down as the syllabus. Your final training plan may look something like this:

• For each of your listed business processes, document step by step instructions on how to carry out that task.
• Then run a demo session with your office, going through your step by step instructions with them on a projector.
• After each business process you show them through, let them ask questions to help them better understand the task at hand.

5. Turn your training plan into documentation

As a bonus step, repurpose your training plan into a quick reference that covers the same topics. By creating a reference guide to your business processes and making it easily accessible, your team can refer to the documentation if they forget how to carry out any of the business processes, and update it if those processes change.