The importance of employee onboarding + my tried ‘n true process
Great, you’ve signed a new employee! Employee onboarding is the first major interaction you will have with your new employee (caveat: your talent acquisition process will likely be your first major interaction you have with your employee before they’re an employee), and it will set the stage for everything that’s to come. Luckily, ensuring a smooth employee onboarding is as easy as following a recipe. But first, why is employee onboarding so important?
The importance of employee onboarding
In an article posted by the Society for Human Resource Management, Amy Hirsch Robinson of the Interchange Consulting Group says, “Onboarding is a magic moment when new employees decide to stay engaged or disengaged. It offers an imprinting window when you can make an impression that stays with new employees for the duration of their careers.”
Think about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon combined with Labeling Theory and Confirmation Bias - when you think of something, you start to see examples of it everywhere; similarly, if you label something, you confine your thoughts to the label and you find examples to support your forgone conclusion. For example, if you have a poor onboarding experience, you may assume the organization is poorly managed, and you will easily spot examples that reinforce that thought. The opposite holds true - if you have a great onboarding experience, you may be more likely to spot the positive aspects of the company, and you may even be more lenient when things don’t go as well later on.
Employee Onboarding Process
Every onboarding process should empower your employee to be successful. Your process should:
Collect relevant information
Inform
Set expectations for success
Provide resources
Foster an early sense of accomplishment
Establish and reinforce your (healthy!) culture
Bonus: “Show, not just tell”
The employee onboarding process may vary from company to company or from role to role, but the basics will be the same. This is the Employee Onboarding Process I use. If you don’t have access to the full folder, simply fill out this form, and I will add the requesting email to my (free!) Entrepreneurs group. It will then unlock access to the folders.
Employee Onboarding elements explained
Collect relevant information: There is some basic information you will need to collect from your employee. For example, you will need to collect information for payroll and their work authorization. You may also want to collect other information like their preferred pronouns or their swag size.
Inform: There is a ton of information about the company, rules, processes, teams, etc. Make sure your new employee has access to this general information. Some roles may require specialized information; for example, a developer may need to know information about your tech stack and a designer might need to understand what tools are available.
You may choose to house this information in a wiki, a handbook, a folder, videos… Regardless of where you keep this information, it should be documented and easily accessible. I like to use a Company Overview folder that has a bunch of general information. It includes topics like our elevator pitch, explanations of tools we use, our time-off policies, how to name and organize documents in our shared Drive, and instructions on how to submit expenses.
Set expectations for success and clear KPIs: Throughout the interview process, you probably spoke about reasonable expectations for the role. It’s important that these are formalized, documented, communicated, and understood.
Provide resources: You need to provide your new employee with the necessary resources to get their job done successfully. What accounts will they need access to? What tools will they need? What budget will they have (and how do they request it)? Whom should they go to for help? Some companies even provide a work buddy for the first couple weeks so the employee has someone specific in their corner.
Foster an early sense of accomplishment: We’ve noticed when our employees are able to successfully complete a project quickly, they are generally <>. I usually like to have a few projects (as task cards) ready to go (I’ll share some examples in a future article). A couple of the projects might be larger, longer-term projects, but I make sure to break them into digestible chunks beforehand. I might have a project that requires them to collaborate with teammates, work cross-functionally, or dig for information. I may include a quick win. At a past company, our engineering manager required all new engineers to submit a pull request within their first week or two of work.
Establish and reinforce your (healthy) company culture: Take every opportunity to promote your company culture. How are you using your onboarding process to espouse your values? Are you collaborative in nature? What does your company prioritize and how does that come through in your employees’ KPIs?
(Bonus) Show, don’t just tell: Using your onboarding process is a great way to showcase how your company operates, the processes you use, the way your teams collaborate, etc. Similar to the above point, use every opportunity you have “to be” and “to show”, not just” say”.
Project management tools for tracking and accountability
I said this before, and I’ll say it again. I like to use a project management tool like Asana to manage all my teams’ projects.
The way I use Asana, I create an Ops (HR) team. I’ll create a private project board called Ops (HR)_People. I’ll have separate columns for Onboarding, Active, Action, Offboarding, and Terminated. If I have Contractors, Interns, and Advisors, I may create separate columns for them or an entirely separate project board.
I create a template task card for each new employee. Each task card will have a subtask for HR Onboarding, Employee Pre-onboarding, Employee General Onboarding, Employee Anniverary, Offboarding, and any “Action” Subtasks. An action could be a raise, promotion, lateral role switch, parental leave, employee performance improvement, etc.
Each subtask will have subtasks.
HR Onboarding: This is assigned (privately) to the HR employee who is responsible for the individual subtasks. These tasks include creating accounts, collecting documentation, scheduling meetings, etc. You may assign a private subtask to another stakeholder.
Employee Pre-onboarding: For some payroll providers (like Rippling), the employee may need to set up an account to even execute the offer letter.
Employee General Onboarding: This subtask is assigned to the new employee and added to the employee’s Asana board in ‘Assigned”.
These subtasks include setting up their company computer, completing payroll tasks, reading through the company overview, scheduling 1:1s. I also include a couple of quizzes - the first is a Google Drive quiz because I want to ensure they know how to name and file documents, and the second is to assign a task specific to our instructions to the HR manager who is responsible for their onboarding. I’ll go into this more in another post.
I mentioned earlier the importance of showing, not just telling. This is great way to get the employee used to learning how to use your project management tool.Employee Anniversary: If you do anything for your employees on their workiversaries or birthdays, it’s nice to have a subtask for each anniversary.
Offboarding: This includes all the tasks associated with employee offboarding. Make sure to keep these tasks private.
Action: An action could be a raise, promotion, lateral role switch, parental leave, employee performance improvement, etc. You can import these templates into the task if/ when the situation arises.
When an employee is being onboarded, their card will be in the “ Onboarding” column. Once the onboarding process is complete, I’ll move their card to “Active”. If there is any action except Onboarding or Offboarding, like an anniversary, PIP, or termination, I’ll move the employee’s card to “Action”. If an employee is offboarding, I’ll move the task to Offboarding. Once the employee has completed Offboarding, I move their task card to “Terminated”.
The employee task cards can have customized fields, like role, team, location, level, etc. Use these to sort and filter your list so you can find and visualize your staff (your payroll provider will normally auto-create a company org chart).
Whatever process you use, communicate it with the team and stick to it!
💡TLDR: Employee onboarding is the first major interaction you will have with your new employee, and it will impact their future opinion of and impact at your company. Create a seamless onboarding process that empowers your employees to be successful.
📖 Exercise: Take a look at your onboarding process and identify ways you can make it more efficient or more robust. If you don’t have one, start creating it!
📎 Download: Employee Onboarding Process. If you don’t have access to the full folder, simply request access here.
🚀 Group Access: Request access to my Entrepreneurs Group to receive more helpful content, special offers, and free access to my Founder Toolkit (including my Google Drive template!).
