There are many steps that can be missed by both new employee and the staff who are onboarding new employees.  We developed a two-prong attack to onboarding new team members since its always a costly situation for a business to endure…   Especially if that person doesn’t work out.  ☹

On-Boarding Woes

Let’s start by stating that this is not a perfect process.  It always needs tweaking but the moment you realize this ONE major tidbit of information; the better the process of on-boarding becomes…

“People Don’t Read”

Yes, we are all guilty of it.  “Yeah, yeah, yeah…  sign, sign, sign…” whether it’s the Apple EULA or that car rental agreement.  However, you think your employment, your livelihood… would require some extra time and attention before signing your life away.  You think…

Everything that a new employee is not acutely aware of becomes a liability for that business going forward.  Please follow the steps below to get your creative juices for making on-boarding issues less of a head-ache for you, your team, and that new person who you like all so much but you have just scratched your head at…  Curiously wondering, why did they just do that?!?!?

Step 1 – Legal Agreement

This is pretty standard.  Send the new employee an employee contract.  For our team, this legal agreement also does doubles as a statement of work.  They know exactly what their role is in the company from day one.

Step 2 – Make the process of on-boarding an employee, a project.

Seriously, why not?  We do this for controlling costs, organizing thoughts, and keeping our clients in the loop.  We send emails to their personal email account to set the boundaries before fully incorporating them into our organization’s Eco-system.   These emails are sent every step of the way through the on-boarding process to ensure everything is done correctly.  This also gives our staff a general idea of…

• how organized the new member is
• how they are able communicate
• how timely they are in that communication.

However, we found that just placing these task specific emails on blast can be a bit chaotic.  Thus, we introduce them to the client portal and they catch a glance of the overall project.  See illustration below.

About Project Management Systems

They are many project management systems out there.  Some are pretty generic, one size fits all approach.  These systems include Asana, Basecamp, etc.  Our project system includes three major components:

• The project itself
  • The project phases.
    • The tasks in the phases.

Key Aspects to Making the Project Management System Work

• Organize your thoughts into specific tasks.
• Reign in the conversation if it bleeds out into other tasks and phases.

What does a project management system with phase and tasks look like?

See below…

 

 

Onboarding new employees summary

Avoid steps missed by both new employee and employer who are onboarding new employees with a project management system.