Many steps can be missed by new employees and the staff who are onboarding new employees.  We developed a two-pronged attack to onboarding new team members since it’s always costly for a business, 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 significant tidbit of information, the onboarding process becomes better.

“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 and livelihood would require some extra time and attention before signing your life away.

Everything a new employee needs to be more acutely aware of becomes a liability for that business going forward.  Please follow the steps below to get your creative juices for making onboarding issues less of a headache for you and your team (and that new person whom you like but have just scratched your head at while curiously wondering, why did they just do that?).

 

Step 1 – Legal Agreement

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

 

Step 2 – Make the process of onboarding an employee a project.

Seriously, why not? We do this to control costs, organize thoughts, and keep our clients in the loop. We send emails to their personal email accounts to set the boundaries before fully incorporating them into our organization’s Ecosystem. These emails are sent every step of the way through the onboarding process to ensure everything is done correctly, which also gives our staff a general idea of:

• how organized the new member is
• how they are able to 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 now introduce them to the client portal so that they catch a glance at the overall project.  See the illustration below.

 

About Project Management Systems

There 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 phases and tasks look like?

See below. The bullet points below each video are an example of how communication can and should be summarized into bullet points.

 

 

 

 

 

Onboarding new employee’s summary

Avoid steps missed by new employees and employers onboarding new employees with a project management system.

 

Autotask Onboarding Intro

 

• 80% fail.  Better training and better qualifying NA talent will create more successful outcomes.
• Focus on trying to prepare the person being onboarded to be very process-oriented.  Spare us all if you do not think you are very process-oriented — i.e., frequent and thorough replies.
• Expose the person being onboarded to the PSA.  A NetworkAntics employee, AKA “resource,” will manage the onboarding project with the person being onboarded.
• You will receive a firm fixed payment for completing 80% or more of the onboarding project.
• Termination of the person being onboarded before 80% of the project is completed will result in no payment.
• The goal is to determine if the person being onboarded meets our expectations as a viable candidate to be working inside the PSA.

Autotask Receiving of Communication

• This video copies the incoming email and pastes into a notepad as an example reply email 
• How to determine what is the talking point

 

 

Timely Communication

 

 

 

• Most people fail to process the message right in front of them with its series of talking points.
• Frequent and thorough replies
• If you receive a PSA ticket notification before 3 p.m., you are expected to respond to that message in the ticket that day.
• Responding the next morning if you receive a PSA ticket notification after 3 p.m. is okay.
• If you repeatedly miss an email, you will not be a good fit for NetworkAntics. Juggling many balls at once is part of the job prerequisite.

 

Managing Email Notifications

 

• Welcome task email notification
• NA resources are assigned to ensure that the onboarded person is able to complete the project within a reasonable amount of time.
• Task and ticket status helps ensure the item is accomplished or pushed along.
• “Waiting for client” status reminds the company contact to respond.
• The inability of the person being onboarded to respond in a timely, proper, or at all manner is a red flag for the team, who is analyzing whether they are a good fit for future employment.

 

 

Project Task Communication

This is video will be for resources who will be leading and responding to project tasks

 

• Explains how tasks within a project are a series of checklist items.
• Accomplishing tasks is hard to make sense of for someone not trained to work in a PSA and be process-oriented, i.e., frequent and thorough replies.
• An example of a thorough reply is summarizing communication like this video but breaking it down into talking points or bullet points, as illustrated here.
• The first onboarding email and all project-related task emails in the future WILL CONTAIN ALL CONTENT FOR ALL FUTURE-RELATED TASK ITEMS. For example, you will already know what items will be expected, but you must focus on all communication above the” thank you “signature.
• There is an expectation that if you work in the MSP, you already know how to communicate thoroughly and frequently.
• Always respond to the support@ email regarding related content or checklist items only.
• These bullet points are created to summarize items currently being discussed in the talking point format.
• Do not jump ahead. Focus on all the email messages being sent to you at this very moment.