Employee Onboarding That Is Ready Before They Arrive

1. 1

   Create the onboarding project when the offer is accepted

   Not on the start date. The moment the offer is signed, so IT has two weeks rather than two hours.

   • One project per starter keeps the record clean and lets you see how many are in flight
   • Set every task's due date relative to the start date

   Carried byTask management
2. 2

   Load the standard checklist

   Contract signed, right to work checked, laptop ordered, accounts requested, desk allocated, buddy assigned, first project chosen. The same list every time, because the whole point is that it does not depend on memory.

   • Build it once as a reusable checklist group
   • A completion rule can hold a task open until the required boxes are ticked, so nothing gets waved through

   Carried byChecklists
3. 3

   Give IT their tasks with real deadlines

   Provisioning tasks assigned to IT, due three days before the start date rather than on it. Late hardware is the single most common onboarding failure and it is entirely preventable.

   Carried byTask managementMentions
4. 4

   Plan day one before day one

   An hour by hour first day, in the calendar. Welcome, laptop setup, team introductions, lunch with the buddy, and one small real task finished before they go home.

   • Finishing something real on day one does more for confidence than a week of reading

   Carried byProject calendar
5. 5

   Point them at documentation that is actually current

   Onboarding is the best audit of your internal documentation you will ever get. Give the new starter a task to log anything they found wrong or missing, and fix it while it is visible.

   Carried byWiki
6. 6

   Set the access they should have, and only that

   Roles decide which projects a new person can see. Getting this right at the start is easier than auditing it in six months, particularly in regulated teams.

   Carried byUser roles and permissions
7. 7

   Set up leave and working pattern

   Part time hours, existing holiday commitments, and the leave balance should be recorded before the first planning meeting, or the first sprint will assume they are available when they are not. Attendance and leave management is available in the Self-Hosted edition.

   Carried byAttendance and leaveWorkload management
8. 8

   Run the thirty, sixty, and ninety day check ins

   Three scheduled conversations with written expectations for each. Put them in the project as tasks with due dates, because the ninety day check in is the one that always slips and it is the one that matters.

   Carried byTask managementProject calendar

1. 1Create one onboarding project properlyUse the Task Tracking or Simple template and build the full task list into it, with owners for HR, IT, the manager, and the buddy.
2. 2Turn the repeatable part into a checklist groupThe pre start and day one items are identical for every hire, so make them reusable rather than retyping them.
3. 3Add the fields you need on every hireStart date, role, manager, location, and working pattern as custom fields rather than in a description.
4. 4Agree the access modelDecide which role a new starter in each function gets, once, and apply it every time.
5. 5Write the day one scheduleHour by hour. It takes twenty minutes to write and it is the difference between a good first day and a wasted one.
6. 6Copy it for the next hireCreate the next onboarding project the same way. The measure of success is that hire number twelve gets what hire number one got.

Teams that must keep employee records inside their own network can run the whole thing on the self-hosted edition, which also includes attendance and leave management.