🧟 How not to be a zombie manager
October 15, 2025
Fall is here, and change is everywhere.
Cool air, shifting leaves — a little change feels good for the soul, right? So take a cue from the season and refresh what's outdated so your team can head into Q4 ready to slay (figuratively, of course).
👉 And let's leave the chaos for the scary movies. Use Trainual to keep your team on the same page, all year long.
THE MANAGERS SURVIVAL KIT
Less workplace zombies, more intentional leadership
When your team’s growing fast, it can start to feel like everyone’s running in different directions — including away from you. Why? Missed goals, scattered tools, and unclear roles can turn any manager into a zombie.
Have no fear. Here are a few ways to get things back under control:
- 🧟♀️ Set winning goals. When objectives are fuzzy, performance can get sluggish. Use this quick template to help your team set goals they can hit.
- 💜 Have sharper 1:1s. 56% of employees feel disconnected at work. Here’s how to make every meeting count — plus pulse-check questions to ask.
- 🪄 Delegate like a pro. Stop being the bottleneck. Document your top recurring tasks and hand them off with confidence.
- ✨ Show and tell. Use a screen-capturing tool to capture your next recurring task and drop it straight into Trainual.
👉 Try one new thing this week to breathe fresh energy into your team. Share what worked with us, and one lucky manager will win a treat from Guidde x Trainual!
GATHER ROUND THE CAMPFIRE
Process horror stories (and how to avoid them)
Even the best teams have a few skeletons hiding in their operational closet. Here are three all-too-real tales of process panic (and how to keep them buried for good).
1. 💻 The disappearing SOP
The ops manager went on PTO, and suddenly, no one knew how to process invoices. Ahh! Turns out, the steps lived in Chad's head, and Chad was currently frozen in Halloweentown by a warlock named Kalabar.
The fix: Trainual gives your team one central place to document and access every how to. So knowledge never walks out the door (or takes the midnight bus).
2. 🕸️ The phantom software owner
Three departments. Two versions of the same software. Zero idea who actually owned the renewal. By the time finance found out, the subscription had expired — and so had productivity.
The fix: Use Trainual’s Software & tools page to track every tool, owner, and renewal date in one place. No more ghost tools, duplicate subscriptions, or scary surprise invoices.
3. 🧛 The onboarding nightmare
A new hire spent their first week piecing together outdated slides, bad videos, and conflicting instructions. By week two, they made a costly, time sucking mistake.
The fix: Trainual makes onboarding plug-and-play. Organize, update, and verify training in one place so every new hire ramps up fast and confidently.
TRICK OR TRAINING
🎃 5 training trends to sweeten your content
We all remember the houses that gave out the bad candy on Halloween… tricked indeed. Training can feel the same way when it’s outdated or dull.
Here are five training treats your team will want to grab by the handful:
- 🍬 Personalized learning: Instead of one-size-fits-all training, use training-specific AI tools to refine content for different audiences — give managers strategic context and new hires a simplified, visual walkthrough.
- 🍫 Microlearning: Break your longest process into 5-minute wins: a GIF for “how to log a sale,” a 20-second video for “how to greet a client,” and a quick quiz to test it.
- 🍭 Gamification: Add quick quizzes, mini-challenges, or progress checkpoints to make training feel like a win, not a task. (And yes... we've got more fun in the works. 😏)
- 🍫 In-the-flow learning: Keep SOPs searchable and accessible on mobile — right when and where people need them.
- 🍬 “Now” culture: Host a quick SOP Swap — everyone grabs an old process, gives it a glow-up, and shares their best “before and after."
👉 Your team (and training) deserves the good stuff. Grab a demo.
UNDEADED
Is outdated content haunting your team?
Picture this: Your new hire logs in to your training system, ready to hit the ground running — and quickly realizes it’s outdated. Broken links, missing steps. Or worse — they don’t realize it’s outdated and they learn how to do things the wrong way.
The last thing you want is cobweb-covered training. When your content’s up-to-date, your team ramps faster, makes fewer mistakes, and has full trust in the system guiding their work.
Here’s how to keep your training content fresh (and avoid a content graveyard):
- Step 1: Assign clear ownership. Every piece of training should have an owner — someone who’s responsible for keeping it accurate and effective. (It doesn’t mean they’re the only one who can update it, but they’re the go-to for making sure those updates don’t fall through the cracks.)
- Step 2: Determine the right checkup cadence. Quarterly is a perfect starting point — often enough to catch changes as they happen, not so often that it becomes unnecessary noise. Keep in mind that high-impact or fast-changing processes may need more frequent reviews, while evergreen content can likely go a bit longer.
- Step 3: Schedule content verification reminders. Find a system that connects the dots — people, content, and timing. Make sure you can assign ownership, schedule regular check-ins, and follow through in one easy flow that keeps updates moving.
🔥 Tip: When you Trainual to set up content verification reminders, they show up as dashboard action items, prompting owners to review, update, and mark material as “Verified.” That stamp (with a date!) gives everyone confidence they’re looking at the latest and greatest.
But what if something changes before my reminder comes?
That’s where content feedback comes in. Make sure your team can flag unclear or outdated info right inside your training system. Quick fixes throughout the year keep scheduled review cycles from becoming a monster — plus, they help continuous improvement become part of the everyday flow.
