Training Your House Staff — Beyond Day One

This is a companion to the "Onboarding a New House Manager" template, not a replacement for it — that one is for the person stepping into the lead role itself. This one is for training whoever joins under them: additional staff, relief coverage, or anyone else who'll independently handle a shift. The app itself has one staff role technically (with an optional balances-visibility permission) — titles like "house manager," "resident technician," or "overnight staff" are how your program organizes the work, not a distinction the software makes for you, so adapt the specifics below to whatever your program actually calls each position.

A core competency checklist, regardless of title

Before anyone handles a shift alone, they should be able to do each of these without having to ask someone else in the moment:

• Locate emergency exits, fire extinguishers, and first aid supplies without hesitating.
• State clearly who to call for a medical emergency, a mental health crisis, and a general safety concern, in that order of urgency.
• Log into the app with the right access and find their way to Check-ins, Chores, and Incident Reports without help.
• Explain the house's curfew and guest policy accurately, in their own words.
• Know where medications are stored and your program's specific rule about staff involvement, if your program handles this at all.

If someone can't do all of these confidently, they're not ready for a solo shift yet — this list is deliberately the floor, not a stretch goal.

Shadow before solo

The same "watch, then do it with someone watching, then do it alone" progression that works for a new house manager works here too, just compressed. A reasonable minimum: shadow a full shift start to finish, then run a shift with an experienced person present but not leading, before handling one entirely alone. Resist the temptation to skip straight to solo coverage just because a schedule gap needs filling — an undertrained person covering a shift alone is a bigger risk than a short-staffed week.

Documentation discipline, from day one

This is the single highest-leverage habit to instill early, and the easiest one to let someone pick up by trial and error instead of teaching directly. Walk a new staff member through the "Documenting a Relapse or Serious Rule Violation" template directly, and have them practice writing a factual, behavior-based incident description — using the "Suggest tighter language" button to see how vague phrasing gets tightened — before they ever need to write a real one under pressure.

A simple sign-off, kept lightweight on purpose

A short, informal checklist — the core competencies above, confirmed by whoever trained them — is enough to know someone is ready. This doesn't need to be a formal certification or tracked as a compliance record in the app; a simple conversation and a mental (or written, on paper) checkmark is the right amount of process for this. If your program wants a record of who's been trained on what, a private staff note is enough — this isn't a resident-facing or auditor-facing record.

Ongoing, not one-and-done

Treat this less like a single onboarding event and more like something worth revisiting — a quick refresher after any real incident (what would we do differently), and a periodic re-walkthrough of emergency procedures even for staff who've been there a while. The people who've been on staff longest are sometimes the ones whose emergency-procedure knowledge has quietly gone stale simply because they haven't needed it in a while.