Onboarding of a new member

In your management team or your Board there will be new members arriving and old members leaving on a regular basis. For Board of Directors it is normally the annual meeting that this revolves around. In this article I will take a closer look at how an onboarding process can be setup for a management team that is using Microsoft Team as a digital workplace.

Introduction

It can be a challenge to get the new members into the team and help them to be able to start to contribute. When you team is using Microsoft 365, it can be quite a job to share all necessary information, links and instructions with the new member. Better then to design an automated flow ahead of time, and start it when the new members are due to be included.

This can be done in Microsoft 365 through the app Power Automate. Power Automate is available in a normal license for Microsoft 365, and the easiest flow you can create is one that triggers when a new member is added to the Team and that has a welcome message published in one of your channels.

If you don’t have any HR or IT department that take care of guiding the new person prior to being added to the Team, it is possible to design a flow that performs the actions that are needed before the person gets added to the Team. For example it is possible to have the following actions happening automatically through the flow:

1. Send out an NDA agreement request to be signed to his or her private email
2. Create the account with Microsoft 365 for the person (if he or she doesn’t have one already)
3. Assign the appropriate licenses to the newly created account
4. Send out the login details for Microsoft 365 (if new account gets created)

For a management team the new member normally is already part of the organization and thus has an account already. From that the person is added as a member to the Team, there are a number of important things the person ought to do.

Step 1: Start the onboarding

I recommend that a management team starts the onboarding process of a new member via submitting a form. In this way it becomes a more structured process (than if the process is started automatically when a new user has been added to the Team).

Step 2: Posting a message to the team to welcome

The first thing that could be scheduled to happen when the onboarding has been started is that a message is posted in a channel saying that the person is being onboarded. The other team members can write to the new member, and make him or her feel welcome.

Step 3: Create a shared onboarding task for the new member

As one step you can have an onboarding task created for the new member. In this way, they get to work with tasks like you do in the team and learn how it works. They also get some real-life tasks to complete.

In our example flow we have added a subtask, “Read all our handbook pages”, and a link to the start page of the team’s handbook (see here for our blog article on how such a handbook implemented in the team’s SharePoint website could be set up).

Step 3: Inform the Team that the onboarding is completed

When the new member has completed his or her task, it is possible to have a new message posted stating that the onboarding has been completed.

Important aspects for designing an onboarding flow

A few important aspects to consider before designing an onboarding flow are:

1. What information do we want the new member to read up on?
2. What actions do we want the new member to take during the process? Should they provide personal information that will be needed in the work of the group or approve some Non-Disclosure Agreement?
3. How do we want the new member to experience the onboarding process with us? What values do we want to convey?

Having an onboarding flow implemented in Microsoft 365 helps you keep a structured approach to the work of the team. New members will be given a structured welcome and get an impression of the team as professional, focused and transparent.

Concluding remarks

With a thought-through flow for onboarding you won’t have to reinvent the wheel every time someone will join your team. You have the possibility to define how you actually work in your digital workplace, and then design the flow based on that (e.g. if you use shared tasks in Planner for your team task, why not already in the onboarding flow let the new members get acquainted with a shared task?).

Do you want to get started? You are welcome to book a free meeting with me (see footer of the website) and I’ll help you get started.