Best Practices: New Hire Onboarding

■

Overview

This article explains best practices for providing a seamless new hire experience using Simpplr. The ideas listed below are by no means the limit of what you can do to best meet the needs of your organization's new hires, but we've seen them effectively put into practice! It's also worth noting we strongly recommend Simpplr's New hire onboarding feature, wherein you can display certain content to new employees.

• Create a New Hire Onboarding site
• Create a Welcome New Hires tile on the HR site
• Create a Welcome New Hires tile on the home dashboard
• Create separate New Hire content on a department level
• Create a Training site

Create a New Hire Onboarding site

Back to top

One effective way of helping your new hires become acclimated to your company culture, processes, and first-day action items is to build them their very own site on your Simpplr intranet. The goal of this site would be to provide all relevant content to new hires such as:

• Sites and content they should visit. Populate the carousel with pages created specifically for new team members. For example, maybe you have a page titled "Welcome Aboard!" that provides a welcome message and links to other relevant information. Or maybe you want to link the Company Benefits page in the carousel. That way everyone will have easy access to it on their first day.
  
• People/onboarding mentors that new hires can contact with questions. Present this in the form of a tile on the home page. For example, In my New Hire Onboarding site, I want to display two HR members, Jennifer Whitman and Nicole Kramer. So I'll add a People tile, then select Custom and call my new tile Onboarding Mentors.
  
• Links to other relevant sites on your intranet. For example, typically the Human Resources site will contain important information for new hires. You can display the link to HR on the site dashboard, just like you did with People.
  
• Files containing benefits information. If your organization keeps benefits on a file storage platform such as Google Drive or SharePoint, maybe you want to link those files directly on a tile for the new hires. Add a new Files tile and choose any documents you'd like to display. Note you must first have a file storage integration with Simpplr before linking to any third party hosting platform.
  
• New Hire checklist or any forms required to complete in the first week. You can create this tile in the form of a Files tile if you have all the documentation saved in a file storage platform or a Rich text value title, wherein you populate it however you'd like. For example, if you have documents stored in multiple locations, create a Rich text tile and simply link each form within the tile.
  

Create a Welcome New Hires tile on the HR site

Back to top

Maybe you don't have enough information to fill out an entire site for new hires. In that case, you can add a tile to an existing site that the entire organization has access to, such as your HR site. We recommend adding a new Pages tile to the site dashboard, then selecting Pages from category and choosing the Onboarding category (if already created). 

This will populate any content created and tagged with the Onboarding category directly to the site dashboard.

Create a Welcome New Hires tile on the home dashboard

Back to top

Similar to what we did above for the HR site, as an App manager, you can also add a welcoming/onboarding tile directly to your users' home dashboards. This way, whenever someone logs in to Simpplr, they'll see the relevant information without having to navigate to a site first. Again, this is recommended if you don't have a lot of specific information relevant to new hires. However, you can add as many tiles and pieces of content as you want to users' home dashboards. 

One recommendation is to add a "Things to know" tile. This can be in the form of a Site categories tile that highlights important company information like Departments, Locations, Company wide info, etc. This way your new hires can become more familiar with the whole organization while at the same time finding important information throughout the intranet.

Create separate New Hire content on a department level

Back to top

For larger organizations, there may be occasions where some new hire information is only applicable to certain team members depending on your department or location. In this case, each functional department or segment throughout your Simpplr intranet can set up its own onboarding site.

For example, a Customer Success department at Demo Company has its own private site exclusively for onboarding CS team members. Only new members of the CS team will have access to the site, and only information specific to the Customer Success team will be populated.

In addition to all the practices discussed above, here we can lay out a week-by-week plan for our new hires in the form of pages. These pages will walk users through each step they need to complete by a certain time. Now we've created an entire onboarding plan for our new CS team members.

Create a Training site

Back to top

Already have a complete onboarding plan that includes user guides, videos, IT support links, etc.? You can populate all of that on a Training site. If your organization uses a number of applications to help new hires in their onboarding journeys, why not centralize all of it in one convenient location for them? In the example below, we've created a Training Resources site. We've included things like:

• Tech tips
• Upcoming training events
• Pages that include links to user guides
• How-to Guides