have you just hired or looking to hire a new employee and you want to make sure that you set them up for success by properly all boring them into your company if that sounds like you you're gonna want to keep watching this video because we're gonna walk through a sample new employee onboarding checklist and give you tips on how you can build your own so you don't miss any steps [Music] I'm Christy and I'm Mike and welcome back to our channel where we love sharing tactical tips and best practices on how you can level up your small business so if you want to take your small business to the next level make sure you hit the subscribe button so you get more awesome videos like this I'm learning a new employee is really critical to make sure that they hit the ground running a lot of companies invest all this time into recruiting and hiring and finding the right candidate hiring them and then their first day it's kind of like hey here's the company figure it out yeah onboarding super critical here we've kind of fallen into this trap in the past where we bring people in and just let them figure things out but it's really important that you get good at boarding them into the company and setting them up for success they need to understand what the expectations are of them they need to understand how your company operates and the better you get at delivering this onboarding process to them the faster they're going to have the positive impact you're looking for in the business right which is important because the first day they come in you're spending money on this employee that's right there on the clock you're paying their salary so you want to make sure that as quickly as possible they're able to add value and you're able to get that return on the investment or you're just able to overcome these problems or challenges that you have in the business which led you to try and fill this role in the first place right and for us as a remote company being remote has really forced us to get really good and very deliberate about putting together all the steps in place so that when we hire a new employee they can you know come in and just hit the ground running so in this video we've broken it into three parts the first part is a checklist for preparing for the new hire the second part is a checklist for their very first day and the third part is onboarding through their first three months with your company the first part of our checklist is about getting ready for the employees first day of work all the things you have to prepare ahead of time so that when they come in they can just get started so the first thing on the checklist is to make sure you have and prepare any hardware or equipment or tools that they're gonna need Mac's laptops keyboards pens paper uniform badges whatever they're gonna need make sure you have that stuff ready before their first day the next thing on the checklist is to create the list of softer and accounts that they're going to need to do their job no fur ass this looks like setting up their email account getting them into daylight setting up their slack account giving them access to the wiki all the things they need in order to do their job the benefit of doing this ahead of time is that means that on day one when they sit down they just go through their inbox and accept all the invites the next thing on the checklist is the prep paperwork and who doesn't love paperwork you want to make sure your contracts are ready to go payroll forms are ready to go employee benefits whatever paperwork you need them to sign make sure you have ready ahead of time and the contract is an important one you want to make sure you put a lot of thought into that when you start hiring people because you want to make sure you're protecting the business you're bringing somebody new into the into the company you're still not quite a hundred percent on them you have to vet them a little bit more so you want to make sure you have the right protections there in case it doesn't work out right so for us as a company what were some things that we had to think about and include in our employee contract yeah so for us there's key things for you there might be different things I think it's important to just be deliberate and think it through but for us some of some examples are intellectual property rights we create software so we want to make sure that we retain their rights to anything in the employee creates on company time privacy and security we store a lot of customer data so we want to make sure that people are aware that they are responsible for keeping that in mind privacy and security non-compete we don't want people leaving with trade secrets that are ours and working for our competitor and another thing that most businesses should have in the contract to make sure that they're open and transparent about this as the disciplinary procedure that you have an escalating policy so that people have a warning and eventually they need to know that their job could be on the line if their performance is not up to snuff right good to get all those expectations up front before they're starting yep the last and probably most important step in your checklist to get prepared for the employees first day of work is getting really crystal clear on what their role expectations are you want to create a blueprint that you can hand to the employees so they know exactly what you're expecting and how they can be successful at their role I like to use the analogy of playing a sport if you don't know the rules of the sport how are you possibly going to win so you want to make sure you have a lot of detail around what are the expectations for the key performance indicators or the results you want them to drive what are the core competencies they're going to need to be successful in the role and what are your core values and how do they live up to those right so for core competency this is good this goes beyond a job description so for example does this person need to be really detail-oriented does this role require someone to be a strategic thinker or great at planning or executing a plan these are things that you want to identify early on so that way when you hire that employee maybe you see early on that they're not really a strategic thinker and that's really critical that helps you identify that they're not a good fit for this role and beyond just a good fit for the role you want to make sure they're a good fit for the company which is why core values are so important now you want to make sure that they understand what their expectations are in terms of how to conduct themselves in the business and we did a video on company culture which talked a bit about core values it can check that out in the description down below so the blueprint is not only something you want to give to the employee that they can use it's something that you're gonna use the more that you can understand your expectations yourself the less gut feel you have to use and sort of measuring whether this employee is living up to your expectations and will help you give coaching and direction and how they can correct things that are not going quite right so like we said this is probably the most important step you need in order to get ready for the employees first day of work do not skip this step alright so part two is all about preparing a checklist for the employees very first date by now you should have followed our previous checklist for prep so you have everything ready to go for their first day so they can hit the ground running yeah and this really sets a great example for the employee of your expectations because you're gonna wow them by having everything ready and they're not gonna miss a beat they're gonna be able to get up and running get interacting with other employees get their tools going very quickly and that's gonna start setting them up for success the first thing on the checklist for day 1 pretty obvious give them the tools and equipment that you've prepped for them laptops keyboards iPhones iPads pens paper give them everything that they need the next step on the checklist is giving them access to all the software and accounts that you set up before they started there's someone you will sit them down get them into their email and allow them to go through and accept all those invites to the services that you use on a daily basis maybe think about giving them some context about your expectations around these tools as well I've seen that a lot of companies don't tend to do this and then you start to get wild wild west in some of these different tools like slack for example so I think it's important to give them a little bit of training and explain to them how the business uses these tool next thing on the checklist for day 1 is get them to sign whatever paperwork you prepped employee contract benefits payroll paperwork whatever you have prepped make sure they find all the paperwork and get all that filled out the next step in the checklist is to sit the new employee down and walk them through the rule expectations go back to the blueprint that you created and use that to align yourself with them on what you want to see out of the roll yeah if you want to set the employee up for success and make sure that they're living up to expectations in the role you want to go over that blueprint with them so they know what KPIs key performance indicators they're being measured on what results you're expecting them to achieve what core competencies they're going to be measured on and what core values they're going to be measured on and expected to live if you do this well then they should be able to go home on a daily basis understanding whether they did a good job that day or not and that's a great place for an employee to be because then they know how to improve and get better at delivering the results that you're expecting the last thing on the checklist for a new employees first day is to introduce them to the immediate people that they'll be working with people on their team their direct manager and whoever they need to go to for questions you don't want to overwhelm them by introducing them to everyone in the company especially if you're like 10 people or more because that can be a little bit daunting for a new employee but just the point people and the people that they need to know that they're gonna be interacting with on a day to day basis now that your new employee has started and had their first day it's time to go into the third part of the checklist and this is the probationary period and it's really important to have a checklist that keeps you disciplined on measuring their progress so that you can make a call on whether they're the right fit or not as early as possible right onboarding doesn't begin or end on day one or their first week onboarding is really that first couple of months to make sure you're doing the best job possible to set them up for success so they can be successful and making sure that they're the right fit for the role and for the company because the first 90 days with an employee looks the same as the first 900 days with an employee the first step in this part of the checklist is to give the new employee context about the company and it's really important that you do this because without this context it's gonna be very hard for them to be a productive contributor to the business you want to make sure they understand some of the history of the business some of the key challenges that it's facing right now how they fit into the picture and where the business is going so that they know how to add value on a constant basis and that's really what you want that's why you've hired them you want them to help improve at the business so what we do is when we hire a new employee we'll schedule over the first week or first two weeks a one-on-one with them and each kind of head of the company or sorry head of the department so they'll meet with head of support engineering marketing the CEO or CEO and that way it gives them an opportunity to get context around each department where the department is focused key challenges that they're facing and that way they have a lot of context to when they're giving feedback they understand where the department is going as a whole and how the company's aligned yeah and I find that this helps bring them onto the team and make them feel a part of the family so to speak because the existing employees have a lot of insider information sort of about the history and challenges we've been through and little jokes and stuff like that so giving the new employee some of that context helps them kind of jive with the team better it also it gives them the sense that the top people at the company are willing to talk to everybody they want to hear from all the employees so when they have feedback they feel comfortable raising it the next step on the onboarding employee checklist is a schedule of daily check-ins so one thing that we learned from our business coach is that when we hire a new employee we should schedule a check-in with them every day at the end of the day for like 10 or 15 minutes and ask them two very important questions the first is what did you learn today and the second is do you have any questions and this is a really great opportunity to gauge how they're doing and how they're progressing if they don't have anything really interesting to say on a constant basis that's a warning sign that maybe they're not gonna fit in here if they have weird questions or they feel misaligned and you're not able to coach them back then that's also a good indicator that maybe you've got the wrong person in the role so having these daily check-ins is a really great way to sort of keep your finger on the pulse of their progress so they were able to make that call on whether they're the right fit or not as early as possible the last step in the checklist for onboarding a new employee is to schedule a weekly one-on-one with them so this is more than just that 10 or 15-minute check-in every day this should be like 30 minutes or an hour after end of every week and this is an opportunity to touch base with them get an idea for how they're doing with the team what their feedback is and really to be measuring are they meeting expectations are they living up to your core values are they meeting the KPIs usually that takes a couple of weeks till you can actually see if that's happening but you don't want to wait for that to been months down the road now this is a great opportunity to pull out that blueprints and sit down with that and go through it and have that conversation with the employee around the results and the KPI is that Christy mentioned talk through you know why are those doing really well why are they struggling and having those conversations help you sort of gauge where their heads at are they aligned with the businesses trying to achieve are they going off to left field it also helps you be very deliberate on talking through their core competencies if they are struggling with their KPIs or their results it's time to go into the core competencies and then sort of figure out where they're falling short there may be coaching them down there will help them bring up their results so this is a really important of rhythm to get into is meeting with them weekly right if I doing it weekly that way you can see if they're coachable so if they are struggling with a core competency and you're giving advice or giving coaching you can follow up weeks after like are they coachable are they taking that advice or are they still struggling in they're just not a good fit so there you have it there's our new employee onboarding checklist we hope that this gave you some ideas on how you might be able to improve your new employee onboarding and if you'd like a tool to help you manage this process check out daily on our website if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up and if you like this content subscribe to the channel click that little notification bell so you don't miss any future videos and if you have any tips or tricks or questions please leave them down in the comments below make sure you check out the description where we'll include a link to another video we did about company culture and how you can define your own core values and be sure to follow us on social media where we also share small business tips [Music]