Onboarding Program: How to Design One Step by Step [Template]

"Onboarding program" - sounds grand, doesn't it? Whether you're facing the prospect of building a process from scratch or optimizing one your company already has, it's a challenge that can feel intimidating. But in a moment we'll show you there's really nothing to fear. Come on, let's plan your onboarding together - step by step!

The onboarding program - every HR team's nightmare?

While the recruitment process is fairly well understood by now, employee onboarding is seen by more than a few HR departments as a serious challenge. Why?

Onboarding a new hire is a complex, multi-stage process where the paths of all sorts of departments and stakeholders cross. What's more: the bigger the organization, the more versions and offshoots the whole undertaking will have.

For example: a large logistics company will onboard couriers working in the field, but also logistics specialists at HQ, IT specialists building the order-management system, and a whole crowd of customer-service staff. On top of that you have people returning to the company after a longer absence, employees from internal moves, and external contractors who also need to be onboarded into the organization.

The game is worth the candle

How do you fit so many goals, needs, and points of view into a single process? Exactly. No wonder the prospect of designing onboarding gives more than one HR leader a headache.

And the stakes are high. Effective onboarding means major savings, lower turnover, less strain on HR and managers, and - last but not least - extra points for your employer branding efforts.

So it's a challenge worth taking on!

How do you start designing employee onboarding?

Start by getting the lay of the land. So you don't feel like the biblical David fighting Goliath, begin by reducing your unknowns. How? Analyze the starting situation carefully. See what you're really dealing with and what onboarding changes or solutions your organization needs.

1. Run a survey among employees

Create a simple survey asking what's working in your onboarding, what needs to change, and what's clearly missing. Then ask several groups to fill it out: employees currently being onboarded, employees who've already been through it, and the process stakeholders (managers, buddies, and HR/payroll staff).

2. Analyze your current onboarding process

Run a mini audit of your current onboarding activities, content, tools, and ways of communicating. Gather all of this information in one place - it'll come in handy later when your project team collaborates.

3. Define the key goals and needs of onboarding at your company

What's struggling the most for you? The paperwork? Or maybe getting managers involved in the process? What do you want onboarding to fix first? Lower onboarding costs? Fewer people disappearing before their first day? Or freeing HR teams from answering the same repeated questions from new hires? This is the time to define your goals and choose the KPIs you'll use to measure results.

4. Place the new-hire onboarding process in a wider context

Employee onboarding never operates in a vacuum. It should be a natural continuation of the recruitment process and fit neatly into a broader employer branding strategy. So think about how to connect the threads so that, instead of being a lonely little island, onboarding becomes an integral part of the employee lifecycle at your company.

5. Research onboarding tools

You've already analyzed your current process. So you know which systems and tools help you onboard new hires effectively and which ones are a ball and chain. This is a good moment to look for new support - something more comprehensive that lets you automate the onboarding process. Choosing your tools should be an inseparable part of designing onboarding.

A good onboarding program needs different points of view

As we mentioned, a well-designed onboarding process involves very different stakeholders. Onboarding a new hire is a matter for the company - the whole company. It should engage more than just the HR department.

An HR specialist will do a great job introducing the new hire to the organization's culture and the ins and outs of the org structure, but it's the direct manager who knows how to familiarize the newcomer with their role-specific responsibilities. For payroll staff, in turn, gathering the data needed to draw up a contract is bread and butter - so they should have a say in the formal part of onboarding. And so on, and so on.

What does that mean? To land a good onboarding plan, you need teamwork. You need different perspectives and skill sets, so that nothing is built "by gut feel" and instead every stage and element of the process is rooted in the experience of specific people.

Who can be on the project team?

• HR representatives - as the project owners
• representatives of the recruitment team
• managers who onboard new hires
• payroll/accounting staff
• buddies
• IT/helpdesk staff
• members of leadership

How do you map the onboarding process?

Team assembled? Excellent! Now it's time to roll up your sleeves and start the conceptual work together - literally, to start designing the onboarding process. This is classic workshop work.

1) Define the stages and tasks

Divide the onboarding process into stages, for example the four basic ones: preboarding, the welcome, introduction to the organizational culture, and onboarding into the detailed scope of responsibilities. Then think about which tasks, content, and actions should take place at each stage. For example: sending a welcome message, collecting HR data, preparing the workspace.

Done? Now arrange all these little building blocks on a timeline and decide when each thing should happen.

2) Define the touchpoints

All right. Now: how should each action actually materialize? In what form should it reach the employee, the manager, the buddy, and others? An email? A text message? An on-site or online meeting? Or maybe a task or training module in an onboarding app?

3) Think about the questions a new hire might be asking

So that you understand the new hire's goals well and get ahead of as many doubts as possible at each stage of onboarding, map out the potential question marks. This way you'll be able to construct your onboarding content appropriately and minimize the number of questions coming from every new hire.

4) And what about the new hire's emotions?

At the start of a new job, all of us are accompanied by a whole range of emotions. The onboarding process is really one big emotional rollercoaster for a new hire. From excitement and motivating stress, through doubt and feeling lost, all the way to satisfaction and a sense of contentment - or, on the contrary, discouragement and the urge to leave. Sure, a satisfied employee does their job effectively, but also - and this matters even more - thinks less often about leaving their new workplace.

That's exactly why mapping the emotions that accompany a new person is so important. It will let you plan "preemptive actions" and pulse-check surveys that address the critical moments.

5) Assign ownership

Now it's time to look at the finished onboarding map and overlay the organizational structure of your process onto it. Meaning? Assign ownership for the individual elements of onboarding.

Who should be responsible for the formal matters, and who for role-specific onboarding? Who familiarizes the employee with the ecosystem of company tools, and who introduces them to the team and looks after relationships with other employees? Here you think in terms of roles, not specific names.

Onboarding wasn't built in a day - so roll out your plan iteratively

Thanks to mapping the process, you now have a model of employee onboarding in your organization. And you're probably nagged by the question: "So we have to prepare content for all these tasks, messages, training sessions, and so on?" And right after that question, you'll want to shout: "That'll take us ages!"

Relax. You don't have to approach it that way at all. Many of our clients work iteratively, and that's the strategy we recommend most! So what does "iteratively" actually mean here?

It means that, to start, you pick just a slice of the process, work on it, and roll it out - perhaps even for a specific group rather than all the people being onboarded. After successfully introducing one piece, you move on to the next fragments of the onboarding process.

This way the whole undertaking has no chance of overwhelming you. You also have more control over what's being created as you go. You can continuously check your assumptions from the mapping stage and make the changes you need.

How do you create a minimum-version onboarding program like this?

You have a few strategies to choose from. All of them have been tested by our clients - with great results.

Strategy 1: First the universal, then the specific

You start with a universal, heavily pared-down onboarding path. One that will apply to every new hire. So first you fish out all the universal elements from the whole process - for example, filling out HR forms, preparing a welcome pack, sending a welcome message.

Only after rolling out this minimum-version onboarding do you tackle the next, more specific paths - for example, onboarding for IT staff or onboarding for mothers returning from parental leave.

Strategy 2: Tackle the biggest pain points first

Under this strategy, you first work on everything that isn't working in your onboarding. For example, if every employee delivers the required documentation too late, you should put improving the formal side of the process under the microscope. If HR is swamped with manually sending emails containing organizational and logistical information, automating communication will be your priority. Managers not getting involved in onboarding? You'll need to create checklists and other supporting materials for them.

Strategy 3: A chronological approach

That is: you start by developing preboarding, and only then move on to the next stages - for example, basic training or role-specific onboarding.

This strategy has one major upside. Preboarding, which begins right after the recruitment process and ends with the first day of work, is at the same time the most universal phase of onboarding. By investing time in it, you gain a solid chunk of onboarding that you can apply right away to every new hire.

And finally: an effective onboarding program needs automation

Even the best-designed onboarding programs won't fully pass the test if they aren't built on a tool that automates onboarding. The new hire won't feel that wow effect, because they'll still be dealing with a fragmented process, friction, delays, and ordinary human errors - for example, when a manager forgets to request equipment on time. The HR department will still be mired in repetitive, operational work. Manually sending messages, coordinating loads of tasks and meetings, answering the same questions over and over, keeping an eye on deadlines, collecting HR data - brrr.

Which elements of onboarding are perfectly suited to automation?

• launching onboarding processes,
• collecting HR data,
• email and text-message communication,
• answering the most frequently asked questions,
• requesting equipment and access,
• reminders for the manager, buddy, and other roles in the process,
• ordering and shipping the welcome pack,
• organizing onboarding meetings,
• keeping track of the onboarding calendar.

Automation is like the glue that binds the whole onboarding plan together and makes it a coherent, welcoming whole. It also lets you scale the process and manage it flexibly. One month you have 10 people to onboard, the next 50? With an automated process, that doesn't matter to you. In both cases everything will run smoothly and without extra burden on the team.

Download the onboarding process mapping template.