Onboarding is one of those basic things that either goes well or it doesn't. Why not turn it into a process so everyone can have a great first day?

The first step is to identify the trigger for someone being invited to view onboarding resources. In past episodes on Automating People and Org Charts we identified how to tell when new accounts are created and come under the management structure of your department head.

But this isn't the whole story. Because some accounts may be system account or created for contractors to have access to your department resources. But they don't need to be invited to view onboarding resources. How can we narrow this down to only real, bonafide employees? Send an automated email to the manager. Have the manager come to a page where they identify the type of account that was created. If they say it's a new employee, then send the new employee an email with a link to onboarding resources.        

Where should those onboarding resources sit? Is it okay to use a Teams channel for this? No. By their nature, onboarding resources are static and semi-permanent. Teams channels are meant for temporary projects where you need back and forth communication among team members and collaboration on files. Onboarding is not this.

What does make sense is SharePoint. Plus instead of giving someone a random URL to some Teams channel nobody will ever be able to find again, you can make a URL on your SharePoint that makes sense. Like https://company.sharepoint.com/sites/legal/onboarding. See how much easier that is to find? Plus now if someone goes to /sites/legal perhaps you can put a link there to /onboarding.

What kind of content should be in onboarding resources? A welcome from the department head. The mission of the department. A functional org chart showing the functions of the teams. People change often, structure not so much. Make it so the user can click on the various structures in the department and get a brief overview of what they do.

Each team should have a link to their SharePoint page where they give a list of the active members of the team with links to bios. I would also have them create a page for new people joining their team, welcoming them and giving them a list of key people they should get to know.

Notice what we just did there? We put the burden of maintaining current, fast-changing information to the team itself. Onboarding should be a more semi-permanent place that reflect structures that don't change very much.

On the onboarding resources I would put a link in an obvious way that lets everyone know how or who can made edits to the information when changes are needed. Please do not just outsource the creation on your onboarding resources to some outside company that will make a beautiful "module" that you have no way of udpating. Plan for the future. Things change. Make it easy for people to reach out to the poeple who need to make the changes. In line with that, put minimal information on your onboarding resources to minimize the changes that will need to be made in the future.

Additional resources. Think back to when you first joined a company. What other resources would have been nice to know? Perhaps company branding for your email signature? Perhaps a link to the company acronym guide?