Employee Onboarding (Richer)

Summary

Flowset templates can be used as a starting point for a workflow implementation.  Simply find the template that best matches your process requirements and then clone it.  See Workflow Templates for details of using Flowset Templates.

An efficient onboarding process is key to ensuring new employees are welcomed to the new company, understand how they will be brought up to speed with their role and quickly feel they belong.  This template implements a rich onboarding process including

• Upfront preparations for when the offer is accepted including the department they will be working for and site access requirements.
• Ongoing preparations to be ready for when they start including conversations with the new employee via the ticket.
• HR Preparations including background checks and references
• Critical systems and facilities provisioning needed prior to the new employee starting
• Non critical systems and facilities needed soon after the new employee starting
• Start day tasks to ensure the new employee is welcomed, has the necessary systems access and knows how their onboarding will proceed.
• Probationary period review schedule

Template Design

The employee onboarding template consists of a number of activities.  These activities represent a set of tasks that need to be performed before moving on to the next activity.  At some points in the process, parallel activities occur.  These represent multiple tasks that can occur at the same time, but which will typically be the responsibility of different teams within the organization to perform and are handled by a separate Zendesk ticket.  The onboarding process will be finished when all activities have been completed.  See Parallel Process Pattern for a description of using parallel activities.

The image above shows the (richer) employee onboarding workflow template.  The activities (in green) show the main steps in the process.  These are 

1. Prepare for New Employee
2. Manager Preparation
3. Start Day
4. Work Onboarding

Additionally, when moving from Prepare for New Employee to Manage Preparation, 3 parallel tickets are created which will be responsible for 

1. HR Management
2. Critical Systems and Facilities Provisioning
3. Non Critical Systems and Facilities Provisioning

The left hand split diamond shape shows that parallel activities (purple) will be created at this point.

The tasks involved in Manager Preparation as well as HR Management and Critical Systems and Facilities Provisioning need to be completed before moving on to Start Day.  The first join diamond shape shows how the parallel activities (purple) and the parent activity (green) need to be complete before moving to Start Day.  The Non Critical Systems and Facilities Provisioning needs to be completed before the process can be completed.  This second join diamond shape shows this dependency.

Process Persisted Fields

Activities will normally gather information to allow their tasks to be completed.  This information is typically local information known only to the activity being performed.  Once you transition on to the next activity, it will gather it's own information to allow it to compete.  There are times, however, where some information gathered in an activity may be needed in subsequent activities.  For example, you don't need to organize a desk for an employee who will be working from home.

Process Persisted Fields can be accessed from any activity and prevent the need to keep asking the same questions in different activities.  The process persisted fields defined in this workflow template are

Detailed Design

The sections below describe details of the tasks involved in each of these top level activities.  See Activity Task Modelling for details of how to define task flows for an activity.

Prepare for New Employee

This activity is where we will capture brief details about the new employee and the proposed date that they will start their new role.  Click the arrow in the top left of the activity shape.  This will display the task flow for this activity.

The task flow for this activity gathers details about the new employee.  The tasks define the fields whose values need to be supplied.  The condition shapes are used to ensure that task information has been filled in sufficiently to progress.  For example, you can specify if a task field must be provided or if it is optional.

The Capture task defines fields to capture the Joiners Name, Check that we have a signed employment contract and the proposed start date.  The condition shape following Capture ensures that all 3 of these fields have been filled out.. Once this condition is satisfied, then the fields defined in the Department task will be shown

The Department task defines fields to capture the new employees intended department and the type of site access that is required for their role. The condition that follows Department ensures that a Department has been supplied (Site Access is optional) and then will show fields from either Commercial, Development or Other depending on the Department that was selected.

The Commercial, Development and Other tasks, define an Applications field which identifies the applications which need to be installed on the new Employees computer to support them in their role.  The initial set of Applications have been tailored for Commercial and Development and a default set is defined for Other.

Manager Preparation

This activity is performed by the manager of the new employee and involves identifying an agenda for the start day as well as preparation of onboarding goals and briefing the team of the impending new team member.  The ticket is then used to send instructions to the new Employee about their first day.

The task flow for this activity provides a checklist of preparations to be made for the new employees first day and communicate instructions for their first day.  The tasks define the fields whose values need to be supplied.  The condition shapes are used to ensure that task information has been filled in sufficiently to progress.  For example, you can specify if a task field must be provided or if it is optional.

The Your Preparation task provides a checklist to remind the manager to prepare a first day agenda, prepare onboarding goals and to brief team of the new employee.  The manager is also instructed to use this ticket to communicate with the new employee by making them the requester of the ticket.  When the requester has been changed, the subsequent condition will satisfy.

At this point, Send Joiner Instructions task will make available a comment template which can be added to the ticket, and when the ticket is submitted, this comment will be sent to the new employee.  The comment should be augmented with any specifics for the new employees first day.

HR Management

This parallel activity (on a separate ticket) would be assigned to the HR Team and is responsible for capturing details from an HR perspective as well as ensuring background checks and references are followed.  Click the + in the top left of the shape to show the process that will be run on this parallel ticket.

The process for the parallel ticket has a single HR Preparation activity.  Click the arrow to show the task flow for this activity.

The template provides a checklist

1. Double check signed employment contract
2. Capture payroll details
3. Ensure background checks are completed
4. Ensure references have been checked
5. Proceed without background checks or references 

The condition ensures that either 1-4 are checked, or 1 & 2 & 5 are checked.  If you choose option 5 (Proceed without background checks), the task flow will move on to the Why Bypass Checks activity where a field is shown to record why the checks are bing bypassed.

Critical Systems and Facilities Provisioning

This parallel activity (on a separate ticket) would be assigned to the Systems Team and is responsible for ordering or identifying computer equipment and software that will be needed prior to the starting day of the new employee.  Click the + in the top left of the shape to show the process that will be run on this parallel ticket.

The process for the parallel ticket has a single Facilities Preparation activity.  Click the arrow to show the task flow for this activity.

The first main task IT Systems Ordering has a check box to indicate that Computer Equipment has been ordered or existing equipment identified that can be used.  The condition that follows checks that this has been checked and then uses information captured in the Prepare for New Employee activity.  If the new employee will be working on site, the Secure Access task will ensure security passes are provisioned.  Otherwise, the task flow moves straight to IT Configuration.

The IT Configuration Task has a check list to ensure the computer equipment has been received and any applications have been installed on it ready for the new employee start date.

The final condition ensures that all relevant details have been captured to complete this part of the process.

Start Day

When the employee joins the company, this activity identifies tasks that should be performed on their first day and preparations for getting them up to speed in their new job.

A series of tasks provide check lists to ensure the new employee is welcomed to their new company.  The Welcome task ensures the new employee has been introduced to the team, have received a company handbook and their ongoing onboarding/training has been identified.  If the new employee is based on site then a Site Tour may be required otherwise we move on the check they have access to all the systems they need.

Finally there is a Day 1 - Wrap-up in which any feedback from the new employee is captured and if any issues with their first day onboarding are identified and classified, these are captured (in Capture Issues).

The conditions use data already captured in the process to decide whether some tasks are needed or can be bypassed.  For example, you don't need a site tour if you are a home worker.

Work Onboarding

Once the employees first day has been completed, this activity will capture a schedule of monthly review meetings to be held to check the onboarding progress of the new employee.

The Schedule Monthly Reviews task defines a set of 3 date fields into which the Month 1, Month 2 and Month 3 review dates can be captured.  This activity does not insist that all 3 dates are provided, but there is a further field to indicate that this activity is complete.

Non Critical Systems and Facilities Provisioning

This parallel activity (on a separate ticket) would be assigned to the Systems Team and is responsible for provisioning anything that will be needed soon after the starting day of the new employee.  Click the + in the top left of the shape to show the process that will be run on this parallel ticket.

The process for the parallel ticket has a single Facilities Provisioning activity.  Click the arrow to show the task flow for this activity.

The first 2 tasks (Guidance and IT Systems) display guidance messages and gather details about a company email address that needs to be created for the new employee.  The condition that follows ensures that the email details have been provided and then will move to the Facilities task if the new employee will be based on site.  This task will capture details about Desk and Phone allocation.  If the new employee is not Based on site, they don't need a desk and hence this task is bypassed.

Customization

The template provides a specific implementation of a rich onboarding process.  Having created a workflow from this template, you are then free to customize it to better suit your needs.  Customization might consist of

1. Adding new activities to cover parts of your onboarding process not covered by the template
2. Delete activities that are not needed in your onboarding process
3. Modify the existing activities to gather more information or change the conditions to identify which task fields are mandatory to complete the task.
4. Add task fields that are based on Zendesk Ticket fields.  This will enable selected task data to be recorded on the Zendesk Ticket and could be used for reporting purposes.
5. Define Groups to assign the parallel tickets to

This is a rich onboarding template.  Flowset includes other simpler and more complex templates for employee onboarding.  It may be that your onboarding process is better matched by one of the other templates.

Onboarding Templates