| We all have the best intentions when bringing on a new team member, striving to have a thoroughly thought-out plan for when they arrive for their first day at work. Unfortunately, the onboarding process is usually more chaotic and confusing than the ideal. This week, I’m going to try to help fix that!
A few months back, we started preparing to welcome a new person to our team. As we started creating our onboarding plan, I sat down with Hannah and asked for her feedback from when she was trained. To my surprised, she answered the process had been “confusing and overwhelming”. Our conversation motivated us to create a new & improved onboarding plan to ensure our upcoming team member would have a buttery experience. I’m now completely relaxed having a well detailed plan for onboarding, and much of this is thanks to Hannah who, as always, brought her A game.
You may be thinking that you don’t hire often, are too small of a business, or don’t have time for creating a clean onboarding process. Before we get into the tips and tricks of building your own onboarding checklist, I’d like to share this article on 8 reasons why you should write business policies and procedures.
Andrew Grant said, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”, and his sentiment nails it on the head for my first point. When you onboard a new team member, they set their own direction based on their impression of your business. If it is unorganized, stressful, and rushed, that energy is going to be reflected in the work they produce. Other important reasons to have a well detailed onboarding plan include remembering critical items (such as updating alarm codes), communicating important information, aligning expectations, ensuring productivity, and more. This approach also applies to terminations of team members, which is even more of a sensitive topic. Blocking access to company resources and property is vital, time sensitive, and should be well planned.
So where do we begin? Best place to start is with a simple brain dump. Gather all existing team members and just throw everything you can think of on a list in random order. Once you are certain you have everything down, start putting them into the following 3 bins: pre-hire, 1st day, and 1st week. Once this is done, you can further organize the first week as needed but do give plenty of time for the new hire to digest and practice what they are given. Here is a great article on creating the ultimate onboarding list with a template.
How can we help? To start, we are launching a personalized IT onboarding and offboarding form for our clients. The form is written in plain English and will take you through a few simple questions to build an IT checklist. The cool part is your internal to-do items will be sent to you once you submit the form so you can have an organized checklist to follow internally. Now you can relax those shoulders and not feel overwhelmed about hiring or letting a team member go.
As always, the CTS Care Team has your back!
– Burak Sarac, Team Lead
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