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Microsoft SharePoint Blog
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The New Employee Onboarding hub – Improving the new hire experience

Matt Wolodarsky's avatar
Matt Wolodarsky
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jul 22, 2020

Planning, implementing, and managing an onboarding experience for new employees is time consuming and challenging. For organizations, its difficult to efficiently onboard new employees into the complexity of an organization’s structure, people, processes, and culture. Only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new employees.[1] For new employees, the onboarding experience is often exciting, but can also be stressful, overwhelming, and inconsistent. Based on research, new employees who have a negative onboarding experience are twice as likely to look for new opportunities within the first six months of starting their new job. [2]


To help our customers improve their new hire onboarding experience, we have launched a new set of SharePoint site templates on the SharePoint look book called the New Employee Onboarding (NEO) hub.

 

 

The NEO hub helps organizations:

  • Provide new employees resources, support, and general information
  • Connect new employees to people, community, and culture
  • Help stakeholders easily contribute to new employee onboarding

 

 

An engaging and well-organized NEO process can make all the difference in helping a new hire navigate through an exciting – but stressful - career journey, and it can have major organizational benefits:

  • Improve new hire performance and time to productivity - Organizations with a standard onboarding process report 50% greater new-hire productivity.[3]
  • Improve new employee retention - 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they had a great onboarding experience.[4]

[1] Gallup, State of the American Workplace, 2017

[2] Gallup, State of the American Workplace, 2017

[3] SHRM, Don't Underestimate the Importance of Good Onboarding, 2017

[4] SHRM, Don't Underestimate the Importance of Good Onboarding, 2017

 

NEO hub

New employee onboarding involves creating an end-to-end experience for new employees that begins before their first day on the job. Research has shown pre-onboarding new hires (after they sign their acceptance letter but before they officially join the company) can lead to higher performance and better retention rates. New employee onboarding also involves providing support on multiple levels within an organization, like corporate and departmental onboarding. Each onboarding level provides its own unique value, contributing to a comprehensive onboarding experience that each new employee will benefit from. To deliver a consistent and integrated new hire onboarding experience the NEO hub consists of three types of SharePoint site templates, designed to work as one cohesive and familiar experience for new hires:

 

What’s included

To help accelerate your implementation of a new employee onboarding hub in your tenant the following highlights just some of the features included:

  • A fully configured and customizable set of new hire sites built on SharePoint communication sites: The NEO hub brings together the sites, information architecture, design, user interface and webparts to help provide new hires with a great onboarding experience. The NEO hub can be customized to add your organization’s new hire content and to align with its look and feel.
  • Onboarding checklist: Onboarding can be an overwhelming experience for new hires with everything the new hire is typically expected to do and learn. Avoid overwhelming your new employees by providing them a curated onboarding journey that paces the new hire through a configurable activity list of onboarding to-do’s.
  • Sample new hire site pages: To inspire and provide design templates for arranging your content, the NEO hub includes sample inner site pages. Use these site pages as templates for your content.
  • Mobile ready: The NEO hub can be easily accessed on mobile devices so your new hires can continue their onboarding from wherever they may be working.

Learn more about the NEO hub. Provision the NEO hub to your tenant today and customize it to help your new hires onboard successfully.

 

FAQ:

Question: What are the requirements for installing the New Employee Onboarding (NEO) Hub into my tenant environment?

Answer:

  • Ensure SharePoint Online is enabled in your environment.
  • The individual that will provision the NEO hub must be the admin of the target tenant for install.

Question: How long will it take to install the site in our tenant environment?

Answer: Based on our testing of the installation, it should take less than 20 minutes. This does not include time required to customize the site to your requirements.

Updated Jul 23, 2020
Version 2.0
SharePoint
  • jurajt's avatar
    jurajt
    Brass Contributor
    Jul 23, 2020

    love this one, got a question though - suppose more than just a single persone is being onboarded at the same time. how will they use the new hire checklist feature? i mean, most probably they complet the tasks independently, so If one of them checks out an item, it'd become checked out for the rest of the new hires, right..?

  • Adam Levithan's avatar
    Adam Levithan
    MVP
    Jul 24, 2020

    @jurajt You can also reach out to me - we also have a webpart that can add to the checklist by assigning individual activities in Planner 🙂
    Matt_Batchelor - In the provisioner you can just rename all the sites before deploying them to your environment. Also, you may not have to be 100% literal and create dozens of new sites - depends on your existing Intranet infrastructure - you could also use pages for some of this functionality. 

  • Matt Wolodarsky's avatar
    Matt Wolodarsky
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    Sep 14, 2020

    Ben Lockwood - this was not the purpose of the use case, however it is doable with the new Microsoft List. 

     

    With the new Microsoft Lists recently launched you will be able to have managers create individual onboarding checklists that they share with specific new hires. In this scenario each new hire would have their own unique onboarding checklist that they can mark as complete so it would not interfere with other new hires who will have their own checklist. Microsoft Lists will ship with a number of different list templates, including a new hire onboarding checklist so managers will have a list template to start with that they can tailor and assign to specific new hires. 

     

    Read more about the release of Microsoft Lists here - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/microsoft-lists-begins-general-availabilit...

  • kevinmckeown8's avatar
    kevinmckeown8
    Steel Contributor
    Dec 17, 2020

    Matt Wolodarsky 
    Can anyone tell me how the Employee Onboarding list template makes any sense and can actually be used?

     

    With the way they have it setup, I don't see how it would be reusable to onboard multiple different employees. The way they have designed it, it is like you would have to create a whole new list with its predefined rows of onboarding items for each employee.

     

    It seems backwards from how lists are typically used and designed. Each instance of an employee being onboarded should be one row item in a single list, it should not require an entire new list for each employee onboarding instance.

  • kevinmckeown8's avatar
    kevinmckeown8
    Steel Contributor
    Jan 04, 2021

    Matt Wolodarsky 

    Typically, or historically, with SharePoint Lists, you wouldn't create an entire new list for each new employee that is hired. Instead, you would have one SharePoint List for onboarding, and each new employee would be a single list item/row in that one SharePoint List. 

     

    This New Employee Onboarding list template in Microsoft Lists seems to be designed so that you would have to create an entire new List for each new employee. How do you expect the people creating these lists to manage all of them? Where do they go to see the several lists that they have created? Is there anyway to roll-up separate onboarding lists into one place?

     

    This is just very different from how SharePoint lists have been used historically. You wouldn't typically create a whole list for just one person's usage. 

  • LindsayAddie's avatar
    LindsayAddie
    Brass Contributor
    Jul 23, 2020

    Thanks so much for this template. I've started modifying it for my organisation's use (a non profit). I will be showing it to two of my peers in an IT integration meeting today.

  • Kaboodle_Colin's avatar
    Kaboodle_Colin
    Copper Contributor
    Jul 25, 2020

    This article makes it clear that the product is aimed at helping new employees before they officially join the organisation.  In my experience most organisations won't set up an account until new employees actually start work, which is understandable as you might get many no-shows or people who change their mind.  So how can they log in an work through their to-do lists when they don't have an account - or am I missing something?

  • FabioBielli's avatar
    FabioBielli
    Iron Contributor
    Jul 28, 2020

    Looks great! I am wondering what about enabling external sharing for pre onboarding site. I mean due to security reason we disabled SharePoint external sharing towards anyone, but we allow for Guest and authenticated users. Will it work by this way? How I should do as new hire with a private email to join the site? Thank you!