What site managers should be allowed to do in the training system

The request usually arrives as a technical one. A franchise manager, a warehouse manager or a plant manager asks for access to the training system so they can see who on their team has finished what. Head office says yes in principle, then spends four months not deciding what exactly that person may do.

The delay is not incompetence. Underneath the access request sit four organisational questions most groups have never answered explicitly, and software cannot answer them. The tension is sharpest in franchising, but the need is identical for anyone running one site inside a larger structure: the warehouse manager who wants to know who was instructed on the new racking rule, the shop manager who wants to know whether Saturday's four have done the till procedure.

The law already names the person you are hesitating to trust

In Belgium, Codex art. I.2-15 requires the employer to entrust the onthaal of every worker to a member of the hierarchical line, who organises it, designates an experienced colleague and signs a document showing the necessary instructions were given (art. I.2-11). In a multi-site group, that member of the hierarchical line is usually the site manager. What else the line manager owes is in what the line manager legally owes.

So when a site manager asks to see whether their new starter has been instructed, they are not asking for a convenience. They are asking for sight of a duty placed on them personally. That does not mean they should get everything. It does mean the default reverses: the question is not why this person should have access, but what would justify withholding it.

Four questions to settle before anyone gets an account

Separate them deliberately. Organisations that treat them as one end up with either a site manager who can do nothing or one who can quietly rewrite a central procedure.

Answer them in order: see, assign, create, change.

Seeing costs less than people expect

Site managers are routinely handed a monthly PDF instead of a view, on grounds rarely examined. The usual objection is comparison: give a manager sight of other sites and they will benchmark and argue. The more common outcome is worse: a manager who sees nothing assumes their site is fine.

The second objection, privacy, deserves more respect. Training records are personal data, and a manager who sees completion for people who do not report to them has access they cannot justify. That argues for scoping the view to the reporting line, not for withholding it. Scope tightly, then be generous inside the scope.

What a site manager needs is small and stable: who is behind, on what, by when, and who is new and therefore not yet cleared for anything. A view that shows that, on a phone, replaces the weekly status email.

Assigning is where delegation becomes real

Viewing changes nothing on the floor. Assigning does, and it is where most groups stall. The case for it is timing. A site manager knows on Tuesday that somebody moves to a different machine on Thursday. If assigning the instruction needs a request to head office, it happens after the change or not at all. Codex art. I.2-21 names a change of function and new work equipment as triggers for training, and those moments are visible at the site and invisible centrally.

The case against is a fear that a manager assigns the wrong thing, or nothing. Both are supervisory problems with a supervisory answer: assignments are visible upward. Arbowet art. 8 lid 4 makes supervising compliance with instructions an employer duty in its own right, so head office watching what sites assign is not micromanagement.

Grant assignment from the central library. Keep the library itself out of reach.

Creating needs an explicit rule

Sites have real local content: the layout of this building, the evacuation route from this floor, the machine on this line, the client whose rules apply at this address. None of it belongs centrally, and forbidding sites to produce it means it gets produced anyway, as a laminated sheet nobody at head office sees.

The workable rule: local content may be created, stays local and never enters the shared library by default. If something local is good enough to generalise, promoting it is a deliberate act by whoever owns the library. That asymmetry, easy to create locally and hard to publish centrally, keeps a library from turning into a shared drive within a year.

When a site manager says a central instruction is wrong

This is the fourth question, and people try to answer it with permissions. It cannot be. A site manager who believes a central procedure does not fit their building is usually right about the building and often wrong about the procedure. The instruction may exist for a reason nobody explained: a regulator, a client contract, an insurance condition, an incident at a site they have never seen. If they can edit it, the reason disappears with the text, silently, at one site.

If they cannot edit it and have no route to challenge it either, the site follows a house version informally, and the gap between written and done grows until an audit or an incident finds it. So the answer is a process with three parts:

Groups that run this find the volume of challenges much lower than feared and the ones that arrive worth reading. Groups that do not discover their house versions during an audit.

Where the platform comes in

If a platform supports scoped access, a site manager can get a view limited to their own people plus the right to assign from the central library without editing it. If it keeps local content out of the shared library, the create rule can be enforced rather than merely agreed. Whether a given platform does both, and how cleanly, is a question to put to any vendor directly and to see demonstrated rather than described.

In Aristotl, a manager's scope is a grant on a node of your structure: the whole organisation, a region or one site. What makes that delegation useful is the record underneath it: completion and knowledge check results per person, per site and per version, readable on a phone, which matters because a site manager has no more of a desk than their team does.

Before looking at software, take one site and write down the answers to the four questions for the person who runs it. The conversation about what a platform should enforce is short once the conversation about who decides what has happened.