4% of new employees leave after a disastrous first day, while 22% of staff turnover takes place during the first 45 days*

There are many issues at stake when welcoming a new employee. Indeed, this last phase of the recruitment process is a crucial step that is supposed to ensure a good start in the working relationship. It involves creating a special bond between the company and the new employee by giving them confidence and integrating them into the new team. The ultimate goal is to build loyalty by passing on the culture and values of your organization. For all these reasons, it is important to take care of your onboarding process from A to Z, and to update it from time to time to ensure its effectiveness. So what are the important steps to a successful onboarding? We will look at three fundamental phases:

• The definition of the tasks involved in the onboarding process
• Designation of the persons concerned by the process
• The planning of the different deadlines surrounding onboarding

* According to a report proposed by LinkedIn. Figures from the study by Bersin by Deloitte: Onboarding Software Solutions 2014: On-ramp for Employee Success.

List the tasks involved in the onboarding of your employees

To begin, you need to define all the steps that make up the onboarding procedure by listing them. This involves respecting the order in which the various tasks must be carried out. Make your to-do list according to the three moments of the onboarding process:

• What needs to be done before the employee takes up the job
• What to do on the employee's first day
• What needs to be done after the employee has taken up his job

The idea is to create a template with a predefined to-do list so that it can be applied to each new employee's onboarding. This method will save you precious time and the procedure will be carried out in a systematic way. If your onboarding differs from department to department, you can create a template for each sector. Below is a template of predefined tasks for you to download. This is a non-exhaustive list and is a good basis for anyone who wants to implement an onboarding process in their organisation.

However, you may have a good predefined task model and fail to achieve effective integration. With standard IT tools, you will write a list of tasks in Excel format. This will then have to be passed on to all the employees concerned so that they carry out the tasks for which they are responsible. It is obvious that this practice can only be partially effective because it does not provide an overview for all participants. To manage your recurring procedures, opt for a collaborative tool!

With WEDO, you can track the progress of your checklists in real time: save templates and then launch checklists from them. This way, everyone involved in the process will be able to access a global view and see the progress of the checklists in progress in order to collaborate on their completion.

Define the persons responsible for the onboarding procedure

The onboarding process of a new employee necessarily involves several people in the company: members of the management, executives, employees in a specific sector, HR, IT managers, secretaries or receptionists. All these people affiliated to different departments will have to work together to ensure the success of the onboarding process. Many people in charge as well as many tasks to be carried out: the onboarding process is getting more complicated! It is therefore difficult to ensure effective follow-up.

With WEDO, you can define the different people responsible for the tasks directly in the template. Thus, each time you launch a checklist, users will receive the tasks that concern them directly in their personal space. Employees are automatically operational because they are informed of what they have to do and when. In addition, they will be able to follow the progress of each checklist and get an overview of their evolution in real time.

Scheduling tasks

Carrying out an onboarding process may require a relative planning of your tasks. What is relative planning? According to a reference date, to be defined each time a checklist is launched, tasks will have to be carried out:

• Before the reference date (D-30)
• On the reference date (in this case the date on which the employee took up the job)
• After the reference date (D+90)

Before the employee takes up his job

Notifying all employees, signing the employment contract and specifications, creating computer access, preparing the workplace and equipment are all tasks that need to be done before the arrival of your new employee.

With the usual IT tools, it seems very complicated to automate this process. With WEDO, you have the possibility to set up a relative planning of tasks. For example, you can define that the task of signing the employment contract must be completed 30 days before the arrival of the new employee. When the checklist is launched, the person in charge of this task will receive it directly with the correct scheduled date in his personal space.

The day the employee is welcomed

Schedule some of the tasks in the model on the reference date. These are the tasks that will be to be completed on the day of the employee's arrival. After this first day, the employees in charge of the reception will be able to make a first assessment of the situation.

After the employee has taken up his job

The integration period generally lasts a few months. Do not lose sight of the tasks to be carried out over the long term. A good integration requires quality follow-up. Schedule tasks in your model that will remind you, for example, to make an appointment for an evaluation at the end of the trial period.

Launch a checklist from your model

Next month, you will welcome Pierre Dupont, the new technical manager of your organization. You wish to prepare his integration by launching a checklist based on the Employee onboarding model previously created. The checklist will contain the employee's name and the reference date will correspond to the date he took up his position. All the generated tasks will be scheduled according to this date. After launching the checklist, the people who collaborate around this procedure will receive the tasks for which they are responsible. They will thus be able to prepare for Pierre's smooth integration!

In the digital age, there are tools that make it possible to centralize information in a single place accessible to all. WEDO allows you to easily collaborate around recurring procedures that concern several employees from different departments. If you want to know where you stand in the onboarding process for your employees, just click on Employee onboarding to see that you have five checklists in progress. In each checklist, you can see in real time, which tasks have been completed and who is taking care of the tasks in progress and by when.

Here is an overview of the current checklists for the onboarding of new employees

If your organization works with WEDO and you would like to set up an Employee onboarding checklist template, you can do so in a few steps:

• Download the Employee onboarding checklist template
• Adapt it according to your internal procedure
• See the article in our Help Center to create a checklist template in WEDO

Want to manage your recurring procedures using WEDO?