How to use ClickUp for New Hire Onboarding (5 easy steps!)

So you're hiring somebody new. Congratulations. And now you're trying to figure out how exactly do I get that person into ClickUp without them having to go through all the pain that I went through when I was first learning ClickUp, right? Yeah. Am I close? In this video, I'm going to go through five different steps that you can do in order to take someone from yes, I'm excited to join your team to Yes, I actually know what the heck I'm doing in ClickUp, piece by piece. Before we dig in today, I want to just let you know what perspective you're listening to here. My name is Layla. I am a ClickUp consultant who's also just gone through a bunch of hiring for our own team. So what I'm going to tell you is not just what I think works best for ClickUp, but what I found to be pretty effective for a small team looking to onboard new team members. So get a dual perspective today. If you have any questions as we go through though, please do drop them in the comments below. And while you're down there, like and subscribe because that helps this video reach more people. All right, all right, enough intro stuff. Step one in the process of getting somebody new up and running inside ClickUp, let's start there. This all comes down to reviewing the SOPs and processes related to the given role. So. So if you guys aren't aware, ClickUp can do a lot more than manage tasks. And one of the things that I like to use ClickUp for is to make sure I know what processes a given role in the business is responsible for. This is not a task by task thing. This is not even an sop. This is more big picture of the recurring kind of objectives that a person is in charge of delivering. So this is how we organize it inside my own ClickUp account. And this screenshot that you're seeing here is part of a proprietary process driven HQ template which we give away to all of our members in the membership info in the description below. But in this template, our main goal is to identify how our people relate to the processes in our business. When I'm looking to bring on a new hire, this is exactly where I start. This is how I write the job description. This is how we run the interviews. And when we're thinking about onboarding, this is how we determine what do we need to do to prepare that person for their role. When I'm looking at this area for onboarding, I'm specifically focused on what technology and what sops I need to give this person access to, because that's going to govern what I'm going to be doing in the next step. For example, in this role here, I see that the office manager needs to have access to our Payroll system, our QuickBooks system, and a few other systems in order to fulfill the processes that are listed here. I can find that out by actually reviewing the processes or just by skimming them and knowing off the top of my head what systems those are held in related to these processes. I can also see what SOPs this person is going to be responsible for maintaining. SOPs are our standard operating procedures or, or our instructions, our recipes, if you will, for how to do common things. These also give me a good sense of what routines this person's going to be responsible for. But really right now I'm just focused on making sure that these SOPs are accurate. They all make sense for the role, that there's nothing missing and that anything that's out of date or maybe irrelevant is wiped away. So this should be a pretty quick step since you already did this when you're writing your job description. But either way, I like to start this section with this review. Ideally, this is going to be done by whoever is currently doing the work. So if I'm hiring a replacement for a current team member who's maybe moving up in the business, I want them to spend the time to review every single process in SOP to make sure it accurately reflects the reality of the role that is step one in the process, which can be done at any point, but typically is best done right before that new person starts. So you can make sure everything is up to the minute accurate when that new person is joining. Now, once we know what this person needs to know, we need to somehow tell it to them in a, in a way that's not going to overwhelm. So. So the second step of this process is actually going to be to create an onboarding zone for your new team member. So the way I like to do this is typically in a list that is housed in a new hires folder. And as you can see here on the screen, my new hires area tends to break down into a 30 day bucket. This onboarding area serves multiple purposes. The very first part is to give this person one source of truth for that first week. Because that's going to be the most chaotic time. We want to make it very clear what's expected of them and how exactly to do it. So the first piece of this onboarding template is purely templated with lots of clear instructions explaining exactly what Someone needs to do to perform a task to get themselves onboarding. The second purpose of this onboarding list is because your team uses ClickUp, you're also teaching your new team member how to use ClickUp by having them use ClickUp. You've heard me say before, I think the best way to learn ClickUp is by using it. And new team members are no exceptions to that rule. So in this new list you might decide to import ClickUp's beginner templates. They've got a, a few templates in there that help people learn ClickUp by using ClickUp. Fun fact, actually before ClickUp started having these kind of built in templates teaching you how to use ClickUp by using ClickUp before those existed, we actually created our own for our clients. So we had a list and each task told them, you know, basically much like Clickups does. Now here's how you do this here. Go ahead and try to create this, go ahead and try to change the assignee, you know, walking someone through how to use ClickUp in order to use ClickUp. And we actually turned that list template into an online course, which is the mini course we now have how to ClickUp. The way that we currently onboard our team members to learn how to use the basics of ClickUp is actually our own course. So we just give all of our team members a link to to go check out for free. And they go check out, they buy the product and they can actually go through the whole beginner course. Not only do they get to know our products that way, but they actually get to learn how to use ClickUp while understanding how we serve clients. So it's kind of a two for one on that one. The main skills or features someone really needs to understand in their first week of using ClickUp are statuses, views, due dates, comments, and how to start their day. You know, where do they go first, what's all that stuff? We have content on all of this inside the mini course. And as you're just kind of using ClickUp, these are usually pretty quick features to pick up on towards the end of that first month, say. I mean, we could even start around two weeks in. We also want to start touching on ClickUp conventions. That's the last piece of real ClickUp knowledge we need to convey in the onboarding stage. ClickUp Conventions is just referring to kind of the rules of the road when it comes to your specific ClickUp account. Is it things like, you know, who's allowed to change the assignee, what do I do with overdue tasks, what's the top priority. How do I figure out what to focus on those kinds of questions? If you haven't already seen, I have a video talking about kind of conventions guides here and if you are a clicking up member, we have a whole template with 10, 14, 12, a whole ClickUp doc outlining a bunch of conventions that we suggest you have inside your ClickUp account with some fill in the blank options there. If you're looking to figure out what exactly your convention should be, this is the last real ClickUp Step when it comes to onboarding is just making sure people know what are the rules of the road. And these will often come up in conversations as we talk through the next few steps. But that is step number two. We want to create the onboarding list, including tasks for the supervisor that could be chosen to be private. We could have tasks for HR in there and we also have tasks for the new person themselves to kind of onboard themselves and to learn the basics about the job in your company. This is going to be a pretty meaty template and one that you're probably going to need to customize just slightly for each role so that people know exactly what to expect when they're starting to work with you. Now, once we have got that onboarding stuff all set up, it is time for the big moment of truth to actually invite that user into your ClickUp account. Now, when it comes to inviting a user, my suggestion would be to invite that new user only to their one list. That is their onboarding list at first. Now long term, I'm not a fan of having someone have their own segmented list. So like Layla's list, John's list, do's list, I don't think that's an effective way to organize ClickUp long term. But for onboarding, containing someone in a sandbox can be really effective to, for lack of a better word, keep them from screwing up other things that you have going on in your workspace. So everything for that person is in there. So when we're inviting them in, we are just inviting them into that one list. I would suggest in your actual onboarding task list around a week or two weeks in, to expand that out progressively to all the other areas this person might need. That could include giving them access to your SOPS area, your reference links area, the actual tasks area, where they might have, you know, additional tasks that they're working on. We want this to be progressive because we really want someone to focus on just mastering that horizontal hierarchy first by being in one list only, they can only focus in on views, tasks and all of those fields associated with them. They won't get distracted by that vertical hierarchy that trips up so many new ClickUp users. Only once they've mastered that horizontal hierarchy do we want to introduce more layers, lists, folders, sections, all that kind of good stuff. The only exception to that might be a dashboard. So whether you do this initially or maybe wait a week or so, something I like to have is that every direct report and supervisor pair has their own one on one dashboard in ClickUp. This is a supplement for the lack of one on one messaging possible. And we basically create a dashboard that looks something like this. Invite the new hire and their supervisor into it, kick out everybody else. So it's private and we have one saved space that we can go to help that person resist the urge to email. For us, at least, we are a no email organization. We do not use email internally for pretty much anything unless there's, you know, some strange emergency or something strange comes in that we're forwarding along. And that can sometimes be an adjustment for people who are used to using email to primarily communicate with their coworkers. So we put this dashboard together as kind of that crutch and we usually describe it something like, if you ever don't know where to go, if you have a discussion not related to a task, or if you have something private you want to share with me, or you can always go to this dashboard and you'll be able to find information there. So that is step three, inviting the user. You're going to invite them into the list and potentially the dashboard, and down the line, invite them into those additional areas. Now that brings us to step four. Now we've invited the person, you know, they're ready to get in and get started. We've got an outlined kind of roadmap of tasks for that first week. I want to dive a little deeper now into what happens once that person arrives. They're in ClickUp, they're probably freaking out or confused or, you know, they're overwhelmed by all that's in there. What can we do to make that initial process easier? I've seen some people who, you know, they do weekly Q and A calls about ClickUp or they'll have a section in their team meetings talking about tech questions. My favorite thing is a little bit more low tech, a little bit more personal. So what I like to do is during that first week of employment, make sure that the supervisor and the direct report have one on one meetings, say two to three times during that first week. They don't have to be long, they could be 10 minutes long, but for a full time employee, that's a good amount of time to give that space to ask the questions. During those meetings that are one on one, I highly recommend you have the new hire share their screen. It can be very tempting as the more knowledgeable ClickUp person to share your screen. Avoid that. Not only are you going to move too fast, but you're going to miss out on the opportunity to learn from observation. So in those meetings, have the other team member, the new team member, share their screen and walk through what they're working on. Any questions that they have while you're watching that, look for tips that you can give that person that are going to directly help them in the actual work that they are doing. One of the best ways for adults to learn is to learn just in time when they have an issue to find the answer to that issue, or when they're working on something to find a better way to do that something. So rather than just sending tips of the day or having an FAQ section for your team members, I really encourage you to listen to them and fill in the gaps in their own knowledge based on your understanding. And I know many of you are going to say, well, I don't really know ClickUp yet myself. You know more than you think you do. And if you don't, we do have resources in the description to help you catch yourself up to speed on the admin side of things, but just focus on the basics. There's always something you can share to make someone else's life easier, even if it's just sharing something that's worked for you in the past. After that first week, the number of check ins can be a little bit less frequent, but I still recommend checking in at least twice a week, maybe more. Honestly, for that first month, aim for three times a week using the chat feature in ClickUp because again, we're trying to train this person to not use email, to not use slack, to know exactly that they can comment to us or chat with us for any time. I like to leave comments that are simple as you know how you doing today in a chat or any questions on this task, just let me know I'm here to help. Just something as simple as that that you can put into a task. Comment lets them know that one you are here and open to help and second reminds them that comments are there for a reason, they're not just notes to self in your business. Comments are the main way that team members communicate to each other. And this can be a great way to set that expectation from the very first month by artificially kind of starting conversations in those comments and making it clear that bugging bugging you isn't really bugging you. It's totally okay to post in comments and ask questions from yourself or other team members. Heck, you can even have other team members help you with this by having them start conversations in the comments just so that your new team member starts to understand the communication culture of the company. Finally, we are at step five of the onboarding process and this is where we want to kick them out. No, we don't want to kick them out of ClickUp, but we do want to kick the new user out of their onboarding list. So this is something that can be a little bit tricky to do, but I definitely recommend doing it long term. Having a team member having their own list or their own folder, it can tend to lead to double data entry where someone has their ideas in their own list rather than putting it in the shared ideas list. They keep a copy of every task in their own list so they can keep track of it. Generally speaking, having a list with your own name on it is a sign that you're not using ClickUp correctly. Rather than using lists, we want to use views, and one of the best ways we can get our new hire used to that way of thinking is to kick them out and to say, hey guys, it's the end of the 30 days, this list is going to go away. Find a new place for your tasks, move them into the general team areas and integrate with the rest of the team. If you really need your own place for note taking or internal processing, go ahead and create your own list that's totally private, but just note that we don't really recommend it because when you create a private area, you can't collaborate with others and it tends to just cause more double data entry and friction than what we need to have in our ClickUp workspace. We'd rather have things be very open and collaborative and everyone sharing comments and notes in the same place than everyone writing their own copy of the same note, which just seems like kind of a waste of time. So that's step five of the onboarding process. You did this beautiful job making this onboarding list and now you need to kick them out of there and get them in integrated with the broader team that they're going to be working on sharing all of the areas that you have shared. If there are tasks they have on their personal list that they truly feel does not have a home in their team structure. That is an opportunity for a conversation and to see how could you make a home so that the whole team has a place for those kinds of thoughts or ideas. For example, maybe your team member really likes to keep track of all of the key launch dates in your team. Like they like to see those dates inside ClickUp so that they have them. Well rather than them having to have that in their own list, why not just make that list a part of your general marketing space called launch dates and have tasks for each dates that everyone can benefit from that knowledge rather than one person tracking all that data and no one else can see it. Once that list is gone, the ClickUp Onboarding Experience is also complete. Now this definitely does not mean the team onboarding experience is complete. I'm sure any HR professional watching this can already speak to all the other things that need to happen after those initial 30 days. But in about 30 days of regular use we should see ClickUp usage and ClickUp understanding reach that level that it needs to be at for daily productivity. Most people are not going to need most of or almost any of the advanced features we might talk about here on this YouTube channel. As long as these masters those core fundamentals of daily productivity and task management, there is nothing more that you need to teach them or to feel burdened to educate them about, unless it's relevant for your specific workflow, in which case educate them one at a time as you actually expand their access and let them into those areas where those advanced features are used. But for the most part it's not really necessary. This is the five step process that has gotten us through quite a few onboarding journeys here at ProcessDriven. But if you have your own tips about onboarding, I mean, I would love to hear them and I'm sure many others would as well. So please do put them in the comments below and let me know while you're down there. Be sure to like this video and even share it with a friend who you know might be using ClickUp, maybe is hiring somebody to help them in ClickUp and you want to make that onboarding process a little bit smoother. Thank you guys so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.