How to Setup and Streamline Your New Hire Onboarding

The first few days on the job can be stressful for not only a new hire but for everyone involved in the introduction and onboarding process. Streamlining the process customized to the needs of both your business and your new employee makes it easier to get past the awkward first week, and get down and into the regular workflow.

Workast can help make the new hire process as seamless as possible.

How to create a new hire template

First, you'll want to gather any documents, training videos, forms, and all other pieces of collateral that are a part of your new hire onboarding process to have them on hand to easily transfer them into Workast. As the process for new hires tends to be repetitive, we recommend creating a new hire template. This way, it can be replicated whenever you hire for a new position.

*Tip: you can learn more about how to create templates here.

Once you've created the template, you'll want to rename the Open Tasks list in the template to your onboarding task heading.  Add additional lists to help organize the tasks, and to help your new hire feel less overwhelmed.

For example, one list could be "HR", one list could be "Training," and so on as they align with your onboarding flow. This way it makes it easy for the new hire to see which tasks need to be completed under each list or topic.

If you often hire for the same or similar types of positions, you can also create multiple templates. (IE, marketing onboarding template, customer service new hire template, dev new hire template, etc.,)

Adding your onboarding tasks to the template

Now's the time to create your onboarding tasks. Obviously, you can't assign tasks to team members that you haven't hired yet, but you can add task followers such as department heads and HR personnel who would be likely to assist your new hire. Once they join the team, it is easy to replicate the template and assign it to any new hires moving forward.

Now it's time to start adding in information and uploading content. Adding descriptions when you create the tasks will help save time later and will save your new hire from asking certain questions later.  Details like "Return benefits forms to Diane in HR, her office is on the third floor across from the elevator" may seem unnecessary, but they are actually really helpful.

There is no such thing as over-communication when hiring new employees, they value the information provided as they are learning your business.

You can also use tags to help label your tasks.  You can use labels such as "Day 1," Day 2," etc., as well as other labels such as "High Priority." And for tasks that have several steps, it's easy to break those down into subtasks. That way you can break the tasks down into bite-sized chunks, and the over-arching task won't show as completed until all subtasks have been finished.

Once you've finished uploading all of your forms, content, instructions, and feel comfortable with your template, you are ready to save it and use it for your new hire on their start date. 

*Bonus, it's now saved for all your future new hires as well!

Importing your onboarding template

 After you've hired your new employee and you're ready for the tasks to go live, import your template into the space they will be working in. From here, once the tasks are imported from the CVS file you can add due dates and assignees. If there are additional attachments, descriptions, or tags - you can also add those in at this step of the process as well. Make sure you add in any pertinent information for your new hire to be able to easily complete each action item.

(You could also add the followers or assignees while creating the template assuming they were in your Workast instance already.)

And once you have loaded in all your information you are ready to set it live! Your new hire workflow will be ready to launch for your new hire. Best of all, you'll be able to see what needs to be accomplished - and it will save both of you the hassle of additional confusion or questions.

Having an onboarding template prepared and ready to go will help start your new employee on the road to success with your team and with Workast.

We want to see your templates, do you have an onboarding template you are proud of? We'd love to see it to share inspiration with businesses just like yours! Contact us and we can show off your work!