Ultimate Remote Employee Onboarding Checklist Template
Layla walks through a remote onboarding checklist she built over six years at ProcessDriven, using SmartSuite to organize tasks and policies. The system structures how new hires integrate into a remote team from day one.
Hey, Norman and I just wanted to check in, see how you're doing on the first day on the marketing team.
What exactly should I be doing to. To be onboarded?
Well, I. I figured you'd just be marketing or something. Right. Good luck.
Want to avoid this kind of confusion when you onboard your first or next employee? Want to make sure that when you have people on your team, they're immediately able to get to work, find out what they need to know and have a impression of your company. If you want any of those things, you're watching the right video and the answer to your question is this guy. This beautiful onboarding list. It's simple, yet really effective about helping you and your new hire understand what needs to happen before and during those first 90 days on the job to make sure everybody actually knows what the heck is going on. But you might be thinking, Layla, I'm one of the 70% of people who haven't subscribed yet. Why should I be listening to you and your opinions on onboarding? I mean, you probably shouldn't listen to anyone, myself included, you just randomly find on the Internet. But if you wanted to do so, some good reasons to do so might be because I've been running the team here at ProcessDriven for about six years. And over these six years, I've hired and onboarded and failed to onboard many, many people. And along the way, not only have I learned from that experience, I've learned from many of the books, resources and best practices that you've probably also stumbled across. And I've taken all of that trial by fire and compiled it into this checklist. Again, everything comes back to the checklist. My process has been over the last six years is to onboard somebody and whether it goes really well or really not so well, to use what I learned to make this checklist better. So what we have here is not just a checklist or a template for onboarding remote employees. It is also kind of the culmination of six plus years of mistakes doing that exact thing and how to prevent them. So. So I'm going to be going through this whole list today in hopes that it helps you in your onboarding. But you know, I'm just a stranger on the Internet. If anything I'm sharing doesn't resonate with you, or if you have any tips you'd like to add, I would love to hear them in the comments below because I'm still learning too. To build out this onboarding checklist, we're actually going to be building two separate collections of Information. The first thing is going to be our task area. We're going to have some kind of collection of things we need to do, and that could either be tasks for us or tasks for our new hire. From there, we're going to create a second area. We're just going to call this data. You could also call this area your info, your wikis, or your articles area, whatever name you want to call it. This second area is where we're going to put information that does not change over time. So we've got tasks and we've got data. This data is going to include things like our HR handbook, as well as information about our mission, vision, and values, as well as anything else that we think we might need to reference for many new hires, not just for the one that we're currently working with. Okay. But whatever you want to call these, tasks and data are our two different components we have here. And when it comes to actually building this out, we could just go ahead and take our whiteboard, draw a giant line down the middle, and say, all right, here's our tasks. Here's the information. But I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to just, whoops, uh, there we go. And I lose my information that I put on a whiteboard or on a notebook or in a printed binder like the one I have right here. So rather than either of these, I'm going to recommend that you and I practice digitizing our onboarding by using some kind of digital task or work management structure. For today's video, I'm actually going to be using the work management software called SmartSuite, which allows me to organize all of the stuff I do in my business, as well as these two pieces. Well, you can't really see this anymore, but it's said data. Hopefully you don't forget that already. And I'm going to organize it all inside one group builder. So in this video, I'm going to show you how to digitize that stuff from your whiteboard and bring it inside the work management software, SmartSuite. Even if you don't use SmartSuite, you'll get value out of this video because we're going to be going through each of the steps to have an awesome onboarding experience, which you could even digitize into sticky notes if you want. But if you are a SmartSuite user, you're going to get bonus value out of this video because you can actually steal some of the templates I'm showcasing in this video for free by using the affiliate link. In the description below. But with that, let's dive inside. What we're going to do is create a template solution called Employee on slash off boarding. Yes, it just rolls off the tongue. We're going to load this into your account to recreate what I'm showing here. And by the way, this template that you're seeing is one that you can get for free when you sign up for your SmartSuite account. So you don't have to create it from scratch. This is right in there waiting for you if you use that link below. But once you create this in your account, you're going to see something that looks like this. Bam. This is the employee onboarding and offboarding organization solution in SmartSuite. And all those words just mean is it's a pre built structure to help you organize this without having to create a bunch of spreadsheets, sticky notes, filling up a whiteboard and hoping you remember. It just brings it all together. Now I've got a few customizations I've made to the solution. Nothing crazy, just a few tweaks to make it work really well for me. But before we go into the whole layout and the full checklist of what 73 different things that I do during onboarding, I want to show you how that task and data stuff we showed over on the whiteboard comes to life here. So when it comes to data, we're going to start there. I actually use the resource library area that's built right into this template to house my data. The reusable information that applies to everybody that's going through onboarding or offboarding or working on the team. It goes here. This resource library is usually where I would house any information that is enduring during the onboarding process. Things like who do we work with, our brand guide, our org charts, all of that stuff I will put inside this resource library. This gives me one spot where I can update this information. No matter how many employees I have going through onboarding, this is my main data area for just information that doesn't require action over here. On the other side though, in both the employee onboarding and offboarding, they're kind of the same thing. I have got areas for tasks. Now, the way task management works in SmartSuite, there are quite a few ways you can arrange it. I talk more about it up in this video. But for this particular template, the way I'm handling tasks is through a feature called sub items. I'm going to scroll down and here is where you can see the tasks. So back on the whiteboard where I talked about having a task area. This is what it looks like inside my SmartSuite. I've got one area for all my tasks. I've got one area for ALL my data. And then there's one magic ingredient. You see it here over on the right, this thing right here, this field is a linked record field and all it does is link my tasks to my data. In this case you can see an example. I've got a meet your onboarding buddy task as part of onboarding. And inside this task I've got a task name, a detailed description letting people know what to expect. And by the way, I'll have this for every single task in onboarding, this kind of formatting. And if I scroll down, I've got a related resources section and this is a link, a connection to things over inside my resource library. So if I give this a click, I will see a list of all of the resources I've created over in that area and I can connect them together. This is super handy for information that changes. For example, this org chart. This org chart might be updated every month, but if I typed out the whole org chart or pasted an image of the org chart right here and duplicated it for every new hire, whenever our org chart changes, I would need to go in and update it in every single record description, which is just too, too much. But on the other hand, if I link to that org chart, I have it in one spot and it's just connected with kind of a hyperlink essentially with this linked record field, I can update that org chart in one place and know that all related onboarding tasks, no matter how many people are going through onboarding, are going to be up to date with the up to date information. Now you might be wondering at this point, Layla, you have a lot of information in this, this one little record here. You've got all these onboarding tasks, you've got all these admin onboarding tasks. Isn't that a little bit much for that new hire to be seeing? And if you are wondering that, wow, how convenient because I would like to address that elephant in the room in SmartSuite. There is a pretty unique feature that's built right into the account and it's field based permissions. All that means is that these squares, you see these kind of chunks of information like this one and this one and this one and this one, all of these fields of information can be adjusted to have different permissions. So it's not just permissions at the overall record. Each of these fields can be hidden or shown based on your preferences. So in this case, I actually have set the admin onboarding tasks using the field permissions to purposely not show up. You can see it right here to anyone other than in this case me. I could also change this to different groups of people. Everyone accept the new hire. I can change this however I wish, but I am able to adjust that visibility on a per field basis and this allows me to have more information in one spot without worrying about overwhelming that new hire. I could hide the notes, I could hide the LinkedIn profile, I could hide or adjust permissions on any of these fields I chose. As a result, even though my information is very centralized, I can make sure it's not overwhelming by restricting what people can see and what they're able to edit using those field permissions. All right, but enough technical talk for now. Let's talk about what this checklist actually is. Because whether you're using SmartSuite, which is really handy, or you're doing it the old fashioned way with a piece of paper, it's really the steps of your process to onboard that bring everything to life. Your software is great, but your system is more important. Whole video on that up here. By the way, if you're like system software, what? Watch that. But let's go inside one of these where I've actually built out our full template to show you what this checklist is. First thing is make sure you complete your virtual office tour. This is either a meeting with somebody on the team or more likely a video recording that shows you around the software we use, how everything is organized and so on. Next up, we make sure people understand how to track their time. At ProcessDriven, we don't bill or charge or anything hourly, but we have everybody track their time so we understand how time is spent across different departments. So, so it's a bookkeeping measure for us, but we still want everybody to know about it and start doing it on day one. And so we have this year. Just a quick note, this is also one of the examples of how you can connect those data sources to our task. The task is to learn about this, but the information is housed over in that related resource and people can track their progress by using the status field here. So task and then this is data information that we're just referencing. Next up we have review your calendar invites for upcoming meetings. I know this sounds really basic. Of course someone would do this clear as kind, right? So in this case what we're asking somebody to do is just go into their email account or their calendar and respond to all of their meetings. We're setting the expectation that at ProcessDriven when you get a meeting, invite RSVP, say yes or no. Leaving things pending is not cool here. It's not helpful for scheduling and so we want to set that expectation. Day one Next up we have add this to your starred. This is basically asking somebody to click this little start icon here so that this task, this record that they're working on is easily accessible and saved to kind of like their bookmarks inside of SmartSuite. So checking that here is the task. Next up, read the team handbook. Yes, we have them do that usually on day one, maybe it's day two. But our team handbook is a really descriptive guide of how everything works at ProcessDriven and if you don't read it, you're gonna miss out on a bunch of things and make a bunch of awkward mistakes. And so we have folks read that there if you would be interested in seeing what our teen handbook looks like. I mean we're not HR professionals but we have combined it from a lot of sources. Happy to share that in a future video. Just write handbook in the comments below and we can make a follow up video. But anyway, next thing we have someone do is upload a photo of themselves. You might have noticed on even this YouTube channel here that I have a pretty specific profile picture. It's a picture of me and then this specific background color that's kind of weird. We do that with for all new hires. So everybody on the team, on every platform and software that they're in, they have the same kind of picture. So picture of them, background removed, certain color background going in. And to make sure that this new hire is integrated into that look and feel before their client facing that is one of our earliest tasks. Oh, and a quick reminder, this whole checklist is for remote onboarding. So if you have a team that is in person, if you you can still use this but you're going to want to tweak some steps to make more sense for having somebody physically in the office with you. But this is all built on my experience running a remote and or hybrid team where you have a small group that you're working with, a startup environment where you can really have a lot of different creative elements incorporated in onboarding. And this is designed to be super effective, super time efficient and not involve a lot of bureaucracy and double checks. It's really meant to get the job done as a effectively and successfully as you can with as little manual work each time. As possible. That was a mouthful, but hopefully, you know what I mean. Remote, remote, remote. All right, let's start. Next up we have a meet your onboarding buddy task. This is one we actually customize for each new hire, but we basically introduce them to one other person on the team, preferably someone who they're not going to be otherwise working with. And the onboarding buddy is there to just answer any questions that come up as a peer support during the whole onboarding process. It's not their manager, it's not someone who's on their team. It's just somebody who a helping hand throughout the whole onboarding journey that they'll be meeting with regularly. So this is what this task looks like for us. We actually prompt new hires to engage with their new onboarding buddy in a specific way to kind of start the conversation. And you see that here. And a bonus point of this is it really gets people used to communicating in SmartSuite in this case by prompting them to use the tool for what it's intended to be used for. So this is a pretty quick task to help them know who that resource is and get used to tagging them. We do the same thing when it comes to meet your manager. While the manager's information, maybe some info about the manager and again a prompt to engage with the manager. I think it's about maybe it's your favorite movie, your favorite food, your favorite superpower, something like that. A similar prompt for conversation. Next, we ask the new hire to update their last name in all of their software. Again, we're going through so many details here because these are the things that otherwise we'd have to do later on. But at ProcessDriven we have all of our team set their last name in every software they use to processdriven. This helps them disguise a little bit their family name and give them a little bit more privacy when we do screen shares like the one you see here. And it also just gives us a unified front whether we're in Gmail or SmartSuite or Missive, wherever we are at, it kind of unifies us all together just like that profile picture. Next, we have a task to meet the process driven team. And all this is is telling somebody to head over to our employee directory, which you could have somewhere else in SmartSuite or in a notebook or wherever you want to keep it and tell your new hire, hey, go here to read about the team you just joined. We will in later on. You'll see we have one on one meetings with each team member. But this is your opportunity to kind of read up on people because we maintain profiles with information about all of our team members inside our employee directory. All right, next up, provide your IP address. This is one of those little things you wouldn't think to ask. But if you are using Google Analytics and you're trying to track different activity, you probably want to be able to identify who's a team member checking your website a bunch of times, and who's a hot lead. So we ask all of our team members to provide this information for wherever they frequently work, and that's that. Next up, we have read our mission, vision and values. This is another one that's just referencing a reference file and it's basically saying, hey, go read that resource. And that's about it. Similarly, go read our sales pages. Understand what we offer to the world. That's our next one. After that, we have learned about your main KPIs. So inside this task, we would tell somebody, here's what your KPIs are, here's why they matter, here's where you can find them. Go learn about them in this task. Next up, we have another information step where we're encouraging someone to learn about how the team communicates. Where do we message? Why do we message there? Where do you go if you're looking to send a quick thought? We break that down inside this task here. And again, we're just asking you to read it over. In onboarding, this is one of those tasks that I feel like a lot of teams just don't think to mention. You know, do we email, do we phone call? What's normal here? And we just leave people to try to figure it out. If you haven't gathered from this onboarding list so far, so many of these tasks, tasks are just trying to avoid those just figure it out moments. Because that not only causes, you know, fear and anxiety in someone that's new, it also just makes it easy to have bad habits form. So we try to get right up in front of it and explain all of the basics just so that there's no fear apprehension in that first week and there's nothing really blocking you from being productive at work. Next up, we have Somebody complete the CliftonStrengths assessment. We send them a link in advance and we just want them to fill it out. This is something we use at ProcessDriven to balance the strengths and personalities on the team. It's a strengths assessment thing and a. If you're not familiar with it, we can probably put a link in the description below. But we have that as our next step as just a way for us to fast track our understanding of this person's strengths and weaknesses, which can be really helpful, especially in those first 30 days. Next up, explore Missive. This is our email tool. I talk more about this up here, but it is our tool for answering all emails. It kind of makes Outlook or Gmail way more powerful by allowing people to share their emails. Absolutely love Missive. And we train every new hire on it because we honestly can't. I can't even imagine doing email in this business without it. Um, I talk more about Missive in this video up here, but you can find the link to it in the description below if you want to check it out. Just really cool tool and cool company and we have a little training on Missive inside this task as well as just some instructions on how to start exploring it. Ready to go. Uh, similarly, we have a setup step for making sure your Missive account is set up. This again is going to be a series of steps that someone needs to go through. So pretty self explanatory. Following that, we ask people to fill in their personal profile. So this could be their SmartSuite profile or your employee directory. Wherever you keep that for us. We usually ask things like, you know, when are you most productive? How do you prefer to communicate? Who are the important people in your life? Do you have any pets? We ask these kinds of, we call them operating instructions. Questions for how we can best work with you. And we ask folks to fill that out inside our employee directory. So that's what this is. Next, learning how idea tasks work in ProcessDriven. Again, trying to leave nothing to be assumed. Process driven. Here we practice the process driven approach. No shocker there. We created it, we practice it. It's the same one we teach to clients inside our program, Process Driven Foundations. And one of the core cornerstones of that framework is having a really clear differentiation between ideas of things we want to do and tasks that we have to do. This kind of balancing act between things we want to do and things we are going to do allows us to avoid shiny object syndrome, keep tasks more organized, and just generally balance our capacity. We teach this to clients inside Process Driven Foundations. So if you're interested in it, you can check out that program below. But we also train every new hire on it because it is the most important thing, especially in those first 30 days, for them to really understand. Next up we have the CARS method, another framework that we use at ProcessDriven that helps us communicate clearly. Actually Filled this one in so you can get a little demo here. Once again, I've got the same formatting of these three sections that I include in every single onboarding task. And we have another related resource here, this case to the CARS method, which is actually something we also shared on a YouTube video which I will link above. But we want to make sure every new hire understands this because this is basically the rules for how we communicate internally at ProcessDriven. So that is the CARS method for communication internally. Next up, we've got another policy here. We have decide to decide as a core value of process driven and that means making autonomous decisions. We've noticed that new hires sometimes struggle with this. They ask for help a lot more than they actually need it just because they're nervous about making a mistake. And so we set this expectation early on that it's okay to make mistakes, but these are the situations where you should probably ask for permission rather than forgiveness. The main purpose of this is to encourage people to make decisions autonomously on their areas of knowledge. And, and we break that down all in this policy here. And by the way, if you want to learn more about any of these policies, just leave me a comment. I'm happy to produce a follow up video or a short or something to share any more details if you're interested in that nerdy stuff. Next, we've got some more reviews. Review the written brand guide. Review the visual brand guide. Next up, take our course. So at ProcessDriven we use quite a bit of software, but at ProcessDriven we also teach teams quite a bit of software and actually how to smartsuite is our low cost online course that we've designed to help other teams onboard their employees into SmartSuite. So go figure. We also have all of our new employees take it as well. So if you are by chance onboarding people into SmartSuite and you want them to understand how to be productive team members in SmartSuite, maybe you have your account set up, but they need to figure out what they're doing. That's what our courses can really help with. We use them for all of our new hires. So if you'd actually like to add that into your own onboarding experience, you can actually go to the description below and sign up for how to SmartSuite. Sign up for your new hire and make sure that they can get in there and get started with a little work on your end as possible. That course is kind of ridiculous in that it includes four weeks of Q and A support from me and my team. So if your new hires have a million questions about how to use SmartSuite and how to get started, and you're like, oh, gosh, that sounds exhausting. Just outsource it to us. That's one of the things we can take care of. But anywho, let's go back into the template. When we have employees go through it, they have kind of extra homework where after every lesson we ask for critical feedback as to how we can get that lesson to be better and clearer. And so moving on, our next piece is to just have folks set their work schedule in Google Calendar, then review our flowchart for who is in charge of which kind of conversations. I talk more about that in this video here, then learn about another framework we have for how we write emails. This again, sounds like something you think, oh, people will just know. But no, to really write an email Like ProcessDriven, we have a series of steps we have people go through, and it makes writing emails faster and easier. Ensures that we all are writing things in a similar way. I talk more about this framework in this video, but we have that here. Next, we have folks watch a video about Radical Candor, a webinar we have on YouTube. Share that with every person. If you're not familiar with Radical Candor, I'll actually put the book in the description below. That's what this is all based on. And it's just a framework for clearer and more honest communication at work. Next up, we have folks subscribe to our Gusto calendar. We use Gusto for all of our payroll, benefits, time off, everything. At ProcessDriven, I could not recommend this software enough. It's made HR possible for a small business. I feel like if I didn't start using Gusto, I'm not sure I would have employees today just because I'd be so anxious about the paperwork. But anyway, we have everybody subscribed to the Gusto calendar when they start so that they can see everybody's time off, holidays, all of that stuff, paydays, it all shows up on their calendar when they do that. So we have that. Next up, we have new hires. Watch Layla's look back. I don't know if you guys have seen these, but every quarter, at least at the time of recording, I have been publishing a honest kind of quarterly review of what's happening inside ProcessDriven. What's going well? What's not going well? I host these live on YouTube every quarter. You can find the playlist up above if we can link it. Or it'll be in the description. And we have our employees watch this too, because I am pretty transparent in these. And this is the exact same information I'd want a new hire to know before they started. And so that is one of their onboarding steps. Next up, learn how to write SOPs. Yes, we have the SOP for SOPs as part of onboarding, and that is our next step. Next, we have folks request time off because at ProcessDriven we don't encourage time off during the onboarding process, but we're planners. So I would love to know in advance how many people are taking a vacation around, you know, Thanksgiving time. And so we ask folks to request as much time off as they know in advance in this task. We also encourage people to use their time off, which is an important priority for me personally. One of the reasons why ProcessDriven does not and will never have an unlimited time off policy is because unlimited time off, especially in the United States, results in people taking much less time off. And so we've designed our whole policy around the fact that we want people to have paid time off and use paid time off. We offer it for part timers and full timers because I really think that's important. To be productive at work is to take time off of work. So anyway, we set that expectation here by having kind of a write up that says, hey, we want you to take this time off. We're so serious about it that we want you to take it off. Like now. Submit it in, let us know. We're excited for you to take time off. This is not something to be ashamed of. I know. I felt that in previous workplaces where I'm like, can I take time off? I don't know. Maybe that's just the American problems that we have. That's a conversation for another day. But there it is. One of our steps in onboarding. This isn't a task in onboarding, but a quick reminder nonetheless that you should click like and subscribe because it doesn't cost you anything and it means a lot to me. Thank you so much. Let's get back to the video. Next up, remember earlier on where we asked somebody to upload a profile picture? Well, in the background in one of these admin tasks, we actually branded that profile picture. And so later on in their onboarding journey, we asked them to take their newly branded photo and put it in all of their accounts. That's what this task is. Next, we teach people how dependencies work. You can actually learn this for yourself by watching this video where I covered this Exact topic just a few weeks ago. And dependencies are super important for our team because we use them all the time, particularly in content production pipelines where the order that things get done really matters. So if you're not super comfortable with dependencies already for your team, or maybe you just don't know why you should start using them, check out that video I linked previously. Super helpful and so helpful we put it in onboarding now. Next up we've got review our customer avatar. So this is a learning task to once again review a pile of documentation that we've written up where we describe the types of clients that we serve. Next, add teammates to your Google Calendar. At ProcessDriven, we encourage everybody to share their Google Calendar. So I can see what Sam's up to, I can see what Sarah's up to, I can see everybody's calendar layered on top of mine and vice versa. They can see everything that's on my calendar. We encourage folks during onboarding to add everybody else on the team to their calendar to make scheduling meetings easier and just encourage a little bit more transparency because we're a remote team. So otherwise how would folks really know when is or is not acceptable to schedule those meetings? Next, we have new hires. Watch the blueprint. This is our training that we have here at ProcessDriven. It's entirely free and it kind of outlines what and why we have the process driven approach. It outlines our whole philosophy in a one, I think it's like 45 minute webinar that we have for free. And by the way, if you want to watch this too, you can find the link in the description below. But we have every new hire watch this so that they understand the real mission and vision behind the process driven approach. And that strategy really guides every single video we produce. Everything we teach clients, it's, you know, it's the big picture that pieces it all together. Next up we have a catch all task to just say, hey, head over to the database and review any other resources you think might be helpful. Yeah, not that creative. And finally, we have our new hires take our main program, which is process Driven Foundations. I've already talked to you about that in this video. But we have all of our team members go through it as well. Not only to understand how we operate because we practice exactly what we preach to clients, but also because we want that critical feedback. Once again, just like with our how to SmartSuite course, we have our new team members give us critical feedback on this program. The reason I love these, these feedback tasks is because One, it encourages the exact behavior we expect to see every single day on the job at ProcessDriven. Taking a process, saying yeah, this is great, I'll do it because I always did it that way is not going to get you very far here. So having people get accustomed to taking something and then giving critical feedback, revising it, pointing out the shortcomings, which they would do in this onboarding task really sets the right tone for how we want them to behave in the future. You know, regularly submitting ideas, regularly sharing new ideas, not being a yes man, those are all important values to us. And this sets that tone and allows us to evaluate that ability in the first week or the first 30 days. And finally we have our 30, 60, 90 day reviews which are just check ins on the different key result areas KRAs that we have for the job. Again, if you'd like me to talk more about kras or how we define what success looks like at each of these intervals, it's something we actually do during the hiring process. Just let me know. You can leave a comment below. I'll put a follow up video on that one. But that is all of our new hire onboarding tasks, excluding meetings, which would be on the person's calendar. So that's that. But unfortunately it's not the new hire that is only working hard during the new hire onboarding process. We also have tasks we have to do on the admin side that our operations person or a manager might be working on. So we've outlined those below in this admin onboarding tasks area, which again we've set to be private thanks to these permissions here. But the tasks involved in the admin side of things are first, adjusting permissions, making sure that the new hire can see this area but that the rest of the team maybe can't. Then there's a task to reassign routine obligations at ProcessDriven. One of the cornerstones of our approach is having routine repeating tasks that guide how people spend their time. And so when someone's onboarded, we want to reassign those routines as quickly as we can to that new person so they understand what their day to day work looks like. Next, we have customized the new hire onboarding tasks. So basically this task is telling us to go up here and tweak anything that needs to be unique for this role. Maybe the marketing person needs to learn more about our marketing stuff. Maybe the customer person needs to learn more about our previous support tickets. This is just going to be tweaking and modifying this set default list for the role and the person. Next up, we create a photo folder. This relates to those profile photo tasks we've already talked about. But we like to create a spot inside our Google Drive for every person's profile image. That's all this is. Next up, we add the new hire into our project management software. Make sure they're in the right teams and have the right access. After that we create a one on one dashboard for that new hire. We use that just as a spot to put any information that just that new hire needs to see. Time tracking information, any kind of reporting that would be helpful. We give them one comprehensive dashboard to just show them what they need to see. Next up, we update existing calendar events like our all team meeting, our role reviews, our quarterly planning. I talk more about the meetings we have at ProcessDriven up in this video, but we just want to update those to include this new person in the agenda and as an invitee. Invitee attendee. Yeah, there we go in this step. Following that, we have a task for all existing team members to subscribe to this new person's calendar in Google Calendar. It's just the inverse of what I told you about earlier. After that we go into Google Admin. We change the person's last name on Google to ocessDriven. That's something that they can't do themselves due to our settings. So we go in there and do that for them. We provide software access. Pretty self explanatory. Next, we add the new hire to our website on our about page. Oh, and a quick shameless plug if you'd like to see your beautiful face on our website. We do have a careers page at ProcessDriven and while we're not always hiring, we are always on the lookout for who might be our next hire. So even if there's not an open position that fits your experience, I'd love to hear from you. And if we do have a match in the future, we'll send you an email and let you know. So. So to see your beautiful face on our website, maybe experience onboarding from a different perspective. You can check out that page which we will link in the description below. After that we have a task to purchase the CliftonStrengths assessment that the new hire takes. We compile the results from their assessment into our Team CliftonStrengths spreadsheet. This is actually a really cool tool that a consultant turned us onto to really rank everybody's results all together on one spreadsheet. It's been super helpful for balancing the team Next up, we have a task to review time tracking to make sure there's no issues. Update meeting agendas to incorporate the new hire. Update the team org chart. Order swag for the new hire in the correct sizes. Mail the new hire that swag. Post an announcement to the team letting them know about the new hire. Set up performance reviews through gusto that we do every single quarter. Create branded profile picture of the new hire, which we've talked about from the other perspective previously. Assign out those key metrics which is involved in updating some of the tasks that the new hire has. And most importantly for all new hires, schedule onboarding calls. So this one has a very detailed description because there are a ton of meetings that we schedule. But in addition to all of the tasks we plan out for onboarding, we schedule a ton of meetings for those first two to three weeks. The reason for this is because I really want people to build genuine relationships. And even though they could spend all day just reading up on basic information, it's no replacement for actually building a real relationship with other people. So we've got meetings on here for i9 and employee verification checks. Welcome calls, one on ones with every team member. One on one with the onboarding buddy, one on one with the CEO. Tours of different spaces, tours of key software. There's probably about 20 different meetings, mostly short, but some not that we incorporate into these first few weeks. And if you'd like me to go more deep into the meeting side of onboarding for us, leave me a comment below. But we really try to fill up those first three weeks, so that way they always have something to do and something to move forward on, and each moment and each hour that that employee is working, they know what they're doing, they know why it matters, and they're able to really learn as quickly as possible. I have a very bad habit of calling the first week or two of someone being on the team their useless period, mainly because they don't know enough to really be able to dig in. And that's, it's a terrible practice, but I, I, it stuck in my head. And the goal of onboarding is to really turn that useless period into a deep learning period. So they're learning so, so much in those first two to three weeks that it feels like they're in a boot camp. And by the end of those two to three weeks, they were able to start contributing. We have most team members contributing on meaningful work in week two, and by week three, they're usually contributing a huge amount to the core routines. That they have. Overall, this process makes onboarding very speedy for all parties involved and makes sure that when we are having one on one human or shadow sessions, it's a great use of both people's time. And anything that's not a great use of people's time is just going to be happening on the new hires timeline and not taking up team time for that hiring process. The way we really make sure that this enduring information is always available is by adding new tasks into this onboarding process when we realize questions come up during onboarding and expanding this resource library area constantly. I mean, this is just a quick, quick glance at some of the tools we have in here, but there are so many more that we have in our real resource library. Like there's probably about a hundred. And so building this out over time when we're not currently onboarding somebody is what allows us to make sure when we do onboard people. It's very quick, it's very efficient, it's very organized. Oh, and a quick nerdy side note, when it comes to this resource library, if you do start building it out as much as we do and you have hundreds of entries here, a nice Little feature in SmartSuite to make this easier to maintain is to use their deduplication feature, which sounds very fancy, but it just basically makes sure that you don't have any duplication. So for example, you could say if a record is created and it has the same name as something you already have, merge those records together. That way you don't end up with five different records for your brand guide. If you accidentally create duplicate records, you can merge them together automatically using this automation, which is super helpful to make sure you don't end up with a bunch of duplicate resources that are out of date. So that's about a wrap on what I consider to be the ultimate remote employee onboarding checklist template. The overall thing has been six years in the making and honestly, I know it's going to get even better because we are onboarding somebody, you know, right after I film this video. So I'm sure as we go through onboarding this next person, we're going to learn new things, figure out new gaps, and refine this even further. But I'm hoping this was a helpful jumping off point for you when you're defining your own employee onboarding process or workflow. But otherwise, until we talk next, thank you to SmartSuite for sponsoring this video. Please use the link in the description below to support them and this channel. And until the next video comes out or until you join one of our programs.
I hope you remember to enjoy the process.
