How to build an employee onboarding workflow

Starting a new role is often confusing, no matter how many times you've moved jobs, because there is so much to learn at once.

Clear employee onboarding workflows help prevent new hires' potential confusion by making sure they have the tools, information, and connections needed to understand their role and the wider admin and culture of the organization. 

Successful employee onboarding workflows reduce the possible overwhelm or confusion new starters can face, but the only end goal isn’t minimizing their discomfort. From a business perspective, onboarding means a new staff member is clear about their tasks and the expectations on them, and has what they need to start working and contribute to the company. Done well, an employee onboarding workflow leads to faster ramp time, because new starters have what they need from day one. 

So, what is an employee onboarding workflow in the first place? Here, we’ll break down the particulars and the typical stages of the workflow. We’ll also highlight common errors to avoid. 

What is an employee onboarding workflow?

An employee onboarding workflow is a structured sequence of steps that help take new hires from accepting their offer letter to becoming an integral part of their team.

The best onboarding workflows combine the practical and personal elements in each step. The practical aspect helps new hires understand roles, responsibilities, and tools, like the deliverables they own or how to access the company’s CRM. The personal angle enables these new team members to find belonging and community. Tasks in this category include introductions and one-on-ones with their manager.

Getting both the practical and personal elements of an employee onboarding workflow right pays off. For example, when a manager makes time to explain the growth trajectory to a new hire, the person can visualize a promising career progression. And when a team lead invests in training the hire on day-to-day tasks, the person gets a running start to the work and completes tasks confidently and well.

Steps of the onboarding process by phase

Onboarding workflows typically have three phases: preboarding (before a new hire’s first day), the first 90 days after the hire, and the period from 90 days to the person’s first annual performance review. Here’s what should ideally happen in each phase.

Preboarding through first day

Preboarding tasks ensure new hires can jump into work on day one. These elements include:  

• Completing paperwork such as tax forms and benefits enrollment. 
• Ordering equipment, like a computer or cell phone, with sufficient lead time.
• Granting access and permissions for equipment, software, and systems.
• Planning and sharing the employee’s first day plan with those involved (e.g., managers, IT, and teammates). 
• Sending a welcome message that confirms the start time and any other first-day details that help the employee gauge expectations.
• Finishing pre-start compliance, like background checks or right-to-work verifications.

First week through first 90 days

During an employee’s first week, onboarding should include essential training and introductions to key colleagues. Aim to give the employee the essentials without overwhelming them. With this information, the new hire should ideally be able to perform their basic tasks and make a contribution (even if small) by the end of the week.

From the first month to 90 days, onboarding should expand its reach. Introduce the new hire to a wider set of colleagues beyond their immediate team and begin secondary training (on more complex or involved tasks). Also use this period to lay the scaffolding for routine tasks, like check-ins with managers or goal tracking. Check in around weeks six to eight to ensure that onboarding tasks are on track and the employee’s integration is going as planned. 

By 90 days, a new hire should be performing their tasks independently and have a clear grasp of their responsibilities.

First-year integration and review

While the third phase of onboarding—from three months to first-year review—is less intense than the first 90 days, it shouldn’t be overlooked, as it’s essential to retention. Support has tapered off, and the employee is faced with the realities of the job. Receiving a check-in can boost the employee’s morale and remind them that, while they’re working more independently, they’re not alone.

Check-ins should generally come from the new hire’s manager or mentor. Build in a quarterly check-in or a review at six months, which can be used to identify the employee’s needs (like additional job-specific training) and provide basic feedback on performance. 

At the year mark, have the employee’s manager take a look back at the last 12 months. If your organization does formal reviews, the annual performance one is the ideal setting for this conversation. If your organization does rolling, informal reviews, have the manager set up a meeting whose sole purpose is to discuss how the employee is feeling in their role so far. By this point, the new hire should be fully integrated into the team and established in their role, marking a shift away from onboarding and into ongoing development.

Workflow ownership and handoffs

Having a clearly assigned owner of each task or activity, as well as points of handoff, is essential for making sure your onboarding workflow runs smoothly. Here’s how to structure assignment and handoffs.

Role ownership across the workflow

Once you have designed the structure of your onboarding workflow, each element should be assigned an owner. In the preboarding phase, tasks will predominantly be assigned to HR, legal, IT, finance, and payroll team members. For example, communication with the new hire will be owned by HR, while IT will be responsible for setting up their equipment and access. 

From the first day onward, the hire’s manager or mentor will usually take the lead. For example, the manager will be responsible for designing and leading a new employee’s first day, and a mentor or colleague “buddy” might be responsible for familiarizing their incoming team member with the company culture.

Managers are generally responsible for ongoing check-ins, like goal-setting sessions and performance reviews. That said, teammates may jump in to provide role-specific training, and HR will get involved when the employee has questions about time off, benefits, pay, or company policies.

Handoffs and escalation points

Without clear handoff and escalation points, a new hire can end up stranded: unsure of how to perform their job or without the right tools to do so.

Here’s an example hand-off cadence to help you visualize how they work. When an offer letter is sent and accepted and the start date confirmed, HR should hand over to IT so that it can fulfill equipment and access requests. Then, once IT has handed over hardware and account details to the hire’s manager, the manager welcomes the new hire and guides them through their first days of work. Because there are so many tasks in a typical onboarding process, it’s a smart practice to assign tasks to a single person instead of a team, as team members might not take the next step to decide who will perform the task, and it will ultimately slip between the cracks. 

Escalation points are alerts that flag a problem, preventing issues from carrying over from one step to the next, causing a negative chain reaction. For example, if HR is missing a form, their CRM or HRIS should send an alert to the new hire asking for this information. Or if IT hits an equipment delay, the manager should be alerted so that they can adjust their day-one plan for a new hire who won't have the tech they need to perform work.

Templates and tools to operationalize the workflow

Templates and tools keep onboarding workflows practical and consistent. Templates ensure that the process is run the same way each time, and the right tools help you keep the workflow on track while also collecting data on how well your onboarding process runs.

Templates that standardize the workflow

Employee onboarding templates generally include: 

• Checklists of tasks that need to be completed before a new hire’s first day, on their first day, during their first week, and during their first 90 days.
• Welcome emails.
• First day plan outline. 
• Training plans, documents, and videos. 
• Forms needed for collecting basic information.
• Review forms that managers can use to track progress.
• Employee handbooks.

Tools that keep the workflow on track

In the digital era, forms and templates often live in a centralized location. That might be an onboarding platform or HRIS, or a shared workspace, like Notion. Both current team members, like the HR, IT, and management personnel who need to send out documentation, and the new hires who need to review and sign, can all access these materials virtually. These systems often also have workflow tracking features that can help you visualize progress and send alerts when you fall behind.

Using these tools will enable you to measure and track metrics, too, like time to productivity, early retention, engagement, longer-term retention, and satisfaction of different staff members. These metrics can then be used to make improvements to your onboarding system. For example, if new hires consistently take too long to reach productivity, you likely have a training gap. Or if employee satisfaction scores are low in the beginning, new hires are probably feeling unsupported and lost.

Common onboarding workflow mistakes

Most onboarding workflows fail in a handful of predictable ways. Knowing them upfront makes them easier to design around, and if you're refining an existing setup, each one doubles as a check to run against what you already have.

Workflow design and coordination mistakes

Some of the most common onboarding problems are, thankfully, the easiest to fix, and they come down to how the workflow is structured and coordinated.

Start with structure. It seems obvious that someone needs email and IT access from day one but doesn’t need introductions to distant divisions until they know their immediate colleagues. And while this may seem obvious, the order in which someone needs information, tools, and connections gets muddled when a process has been built piecemeal or left unreviewed for a while. Often, new hires get all sorts of information—training, intros, company regulations, and cultural cues—dumped on them at once or too late.

This problem can be avoided by gathering information from the hire’s manager and colleagues about what this new team member needs and in what order. You can then derive an onboarding structure to follow, in which the new hire gets the most time-sensitive information first and lower-priority instructions and intros later.

Once the structure is set, assign each a clear dependency and an owner, plus a trigger that kicks off subsequent tasks. This way, everyone involved in onboarding knows what their responsibilities are and when they must fulfill them.

Experience and support mistakes

A strong first impression is important: It helps new employees feel comfortable, valued, and connected, which can have a positive effect on retention and performance. Avoid situations that can cause early friction, like overloading employees with information that they can’t possibly digest at once or leaving them to their own devices with little support from their manager or other colleagues. These types of situations make people feel like they’re on their own and won’t succeed, instead of helping them feel supported, which is the goal.

Also, remember that onboarding is an iterative process that doesn’t end after the first couple of days or weeks after a hire. Integration takes a while because there is so much information to cover, and relationships aren’t built overnight. New team members need to be introduced to systems, understand their tasks and responsibilities, learn how their colleagues fit into their work, and get a hang of processes like payroll or requesting time off.

Start onboarding with the right hire

However refined your onboarding workflow is, you still need to first fill roles with great hires. This happens upstream, at sourcing. 

Juicebox uses plain-language search across more than 800 million profiles, surfacing a well-matched shortlist that includes passive candidates. From there, Juicebox automates personalized outreach cadences that help you connect with your next new hire. Try Juicebox free.

FAQs

What are onboarding procedures?

Onboarding procedures are the tasks and activities that need to take place to make sure a new employee has the information, tools, and connections they need to do their job.

What are the steps of the onboarding process?

Onboarding takes place in three phases. The first phase (preboarding) begins when a job offer is accepted up until the new starter’s first day and includes activities like IT access set-up and paperwork fulfilment. The second phase lasts for 90 days from the first day and covers activities like training on workplace systems or tools and introductions to key colleagues. The third phase lasts from 90 days until the end of the new hire’s first year, and includes performance goal setting and reviews, as well as opportunities for wider workplace integration such as mentorship.

How long should an onboarding workflow last?

An onboarding workflow should ideally begin from the point a job offer is accepted, and last through to the first annual review. Generally, activity is front-loaded in the first three months and tapers off over the year.

What is the difference between an onboarding workflow and a checklist?

An onboarding workflow is a structured sequence of activities that take a new hire from successful candidate to a productive staff member. A workflow sets the task order and names owners and dependencies for each element. An onboarding checklist is a list of actions or activities that people performing an onboarding workflow can tick off as they complete tasks.