You’re hired: 6 ways to welcome your new employee on their first day

While the hiring process can be lengthy and effort-intensive, the preparation for a new hire’s arrival can sometimes be surprisingly rushed and half-baked. Even if HR takes care of general onboarding, there are still plenty of to-dos that team leads need to cover to make their new teammate feel welcome and prepared.

When the onboarding process is clear, new employees become productive faster, feel secure in their new role, and are more engaged—everybody wins.

How to prepare before your new employee arrives

“You’re hired!” usually kicks off a frenzy of activity between the new employee and HR. As for the team the new hire is joining, it can be tempting to slap together some docs and decks and call it a day, but there’s more coordination that needs to happen to welcome new employees and empower them to succeed.

Coordinate with other teams

Assuming everybody else knows what to do for your new hire might lead to things falling through the cracks, which is deflating for someone’s first day. Here’s what to do instead:

• Loop in your IT team to make sure the new hire’s desk and equipment will be ready on day one.

• Be sure to schedule meetings with other teams. For a new sales associate, it’s a good idea to meet with customer success and marketing so they have context on who your customers are and what your company helps them achieve. This fosters better collaboration in the future, too.

Select an onboarding buddy or mentor

Starting at a new company, while exciting, can be intimidating when you aren’t familiar with people and processes. Instead:

• Assign your new employee an “onboarding buddy” or mentor to show them the ropes. Ensure the mentor can make the time commitment and carves out proper time in their schedule beforehand.

• Have their mentor schedule a dedicated time and safe space to ask questions and provide feedback. (You can even do that with a 1-1 project in Asana!)

Update your team’s documentation

Sure, HR might be taking care of the major paperwork, but it’s also important to check in on your own team’s documentation of processes and responsibilities.

• Make sure everything is up to date and gives new hires full context on what your team does and how. For example, a marketing team might want to include process documents on how they run a campaign.

• Check that links are valid and resources are easy to access so they don’t have to dig around. In Asana, you can @mention other tasks and projects and add attachments to tasks (see below).

• Go through your team’s folders or projects to make sure they’re cleanly and clearly organized so your new hire can continue to easily explore resources.

Create an onboarding template

Now that you’ve coordinated with others and updated documentation, it’s a good idea to condense that into a to-do list of all the activities, meetings, and reading your new employee needs to accomplish before they’re fully onboarded.

One way to do that is to create an onboarding checklist template in Asana (or try our pre-made onboarding template). New teammates can start being successful right away because they’ll have all the info in one place and clear expectations about when to get things done. It also gives you a way to check in on their progress and maintain coordination with other teams towards their onboarding. You can repeat it for every new hire so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Using an Asana project, you could group onboarding tasks by:

• Forms and paperwork

• IT

• Benefits

• Meeting & communications

• Finance

• Company & office information

Within each category, you can link out to the relevant information, or provide the contact information of who they should get in touch with—and this is especially easy if you track everything as tasks within an Asana project.

To get started, you can try out our new employee onboarding template and customize it further or follow along with the Guide. You can also assign tasks to others across your company to make sure they’ve prepared what’s needed to train and work with your new employee—all in one place.

There’s a ton of behind-the-scenes work that needs to be done to onboard employees. By using project templates in Asana, we can easily coordinate cross-functionally to make sure everything is ready to give our new teammates a great welcoming experience!”

Welcome your new hire when they get there

Once your new hire starts, help them hit the ground running with a few more activities:

Announce their arrival

New hires know they’re new… but your organization might not. Show them a warm welcome by making a staff announcement to explain their role, as well as a few fun personal details, so people can connect with them. In Asana, you can do this as a team conversation to avoid endless email threads and easily include attachments that won’t get lost. You can even @mention people to keep the conversation going.

Get feedback

As your new employee makes their way through the project, they can provide feedback on the materials surfaced in it and let you know if you should add anything else to it. That helps them feel like they’re contributing to your team from the get-go. This is simple in Asana, where they can use task comments to provide that feedback.

Why welcoming your new employee matters

The first day at a new job is monumental for you and your new hire. For them, it might be their first day in a new city, industry, or career. For your company, it gets you one step closer to your team’s goals. When you set up new employees for success in their role, it means they can hit the ground running and feel right at home on your team to help you hit those goals.

Learn how Asana can help you deliver a great employee experience by running all of your cross-functional programs and activities better.