The New Employee Onboarding hub – Improving the new hire experience

[Matt Wolodarsky]

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.

[Adam Levithan]

Congrats @Matt Wolodarsky, this is a great feature that many people are going to be able to use!

[jurajt]

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..?

[LindsayAddie]

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.

[MATTHEW BATCHELOR]

Can you add multiple versions if you have a single tenant that hosts multiple brands/companies?

[Adam Levithan]

@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 :)
@MATTHEW 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. 

[jurajt]

@Adam Levithan i'm reaching out to you :) what web part do you mean? is it a paid product?

[Matt Wolodarsky]

@jurajt - thanks for the interest in the NEO hub. In addition to the good options @Adam Levithan has pointed out, 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...

The new Microsoft Lists home page and associated eight ready-made templates will begin roll out by end of July 2020, first to Targeted Release customers and then to the broader production environment – inclusive of enterprise, education, and government plans. The Lists app in Microsoft Teams will begin roll out by the end of August 2020. All are expected to be complete in production worldwide by the end of October 2020.

Hope that helps.

[Kaboodle_Colin]

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?

[jurajt]

@Kaboodle_Colin my guess would be, they're supposed to get a guest access on their private email. getting throught it's setup, however (in my experience, anyway), isn't quite as smooth as it should.

i thing, though, there are 2 parts involved - pre-onboarding, as you mentioned, as well as onbarding itself, when the person actually has the company account, so at least that one should be usable.

[FabioBielli]

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!

[Trishay]

Where do we actually find the template to install? 

[FabioBielli]

@Trishay I think you need this:

https://lookbook.microsoft.com/details/75e60a32-9849-4ed4-b83e-b2b08983ad19

[Matt Wolodarsky]

@Kaboodle_Colin - this solution enables both pre-onboarding (enabled via external guest access) and onboarding once new hires officially join the organization. You can learn more about external guest access here (see step 3) - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/provision-neo-hub#step-3-share-the-neo-sites-with-end-us...

[Ben Lockwood]

Is there a way for managers to see if people are checking items off of the checklist to keep track that they are moving through the onboarding process?

[Matt Wolodarsky]

@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...

[FabioBielli]

@Ben Lockwood users in my Company are already loving Lists: many and many possible applications!

[ArefHalmstrand]

Amazing template, great job!!

[Santosh_Sethi]

Dear All Good Morning,

Please help me with below queries:

1) Will there be updated template in future from MS in lookbook for this NewEmployee hub site, if yes then how we can update template in future and how it will impact the existing content in that site?

2) I do already have Hub site around 40 site collection , will this NEO hub site impact the existing Hub site?

Best Regards

Santosh Sethi 

[Mark_Dromgoole]

Is it possible to connect / integrate this other applications?  For example,  if a user needs to be added to JDE or our HR system, could we use the Power Platform to automate this? 

[Mark_Dromgoole]

Additionally is it possible to arrange a live demo? It looks a good fit for us.

[udspwl]

Great Work!

Exactly what we need.

One question: Who to create a new department-site, we need more than two?

[Kevin McKeown]

@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.

[Matt Wolodarsky]

@udspwl - thanks for checking out the NEO site. We are planning to break up the single NEO hub package on lookbook into three different site packages, including one departmental site template. You could use that to install as many as you'd like, provided each has its own unique name. This update should be available later this month. Not 100% sure this answers your question. Please clarify your question if not. 

[Matt Wolodarsky]

@Kevin McKeown - the list we've included in the NEO site template is for displaying all of the onboarding activities a new employee should complete to onboard and get to productivity. From our research speaking with multiple organizations this is a pretty common use case for new employee onboarding. Many organizations today provide all new employees with an onboarding checklist in Word or Excel.

There is also now an onboarding checklist template that's been included in Microsoft Lists that can be used to assign the checklist to individual employees (personalized as required by the manager) so they can track and report their completion of the various onboarding activities. 

I'm not sure I fully understand the use case you are describing. Can you please elaborate? What outcome are your trying to accomplish? 

One thing I learned about new employee onboarding in my research is that there are multiple use cases, so yours could be another one that Microsoft Lists can possibly solve. 

[Kevin McKeown]

@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. 

[Matt Wolodarsky]

@Kevin McKeown - it's not a requirement to create one list per employee. You could just have one list and share with all applicable employees for viewing purposes. If you wanted each new hire to have a unique list (dependent on what team they work on) and/or to track new hire completion status you would need to create a list for each new hire. The workflow would be to have managers share the list with each of their new hires. The manager would be able to manage/view the lists they've shared with their new hires via Microsoft Lists. 

[Martina_Bln]

@Matt Wolodarsky in Microsoft To Do App you are able to share lists with other users but not within the Teams Lists App (there is no sharing option). In case that there are more than one new employees is there an option to have a template list with all standard onboarding items incl. deadlines that can be imported into the Microsoft To Do App? Or does the Manager has to create every single list item individually per employee - which would be a big effort for several new employees.

I'm looking for an easy and efficiant solution. Thank you.

[ytherien]

@Matt Wolodarsky  Trying to do exactly the same. Follow 14 new hires (TODO's) on a weekly basis without having to create 14 lists. 

Do I understand correctly that the only OPTION is to use 1 - LIST per Employee AND/OR create LISTS in MS TODO and share individually!

my Understanding for the time being cannot use PLANNER for this type of follow. 

We also have certain annual activities (training and reading) that my entire team must complete and must be followed (again 1 liste per person???) Because PLANNER only allow 11 people affected and even SO anyone who closes the task ends it for ALL!

Thanks. !!!

[SarTorrington]

@Matt Wolodarsky  Hey, so Im struggling to understand the issue above in regards to the checklists? Is it possible to publish this out to all new hires and would they have their own page, perse, so that we can track it?

Do we have any articles in which explains best practices of the Sharepoint site and how to manage this from a manager's perspective?

[zvagi]

Hi there - having the New Employee Onboarding hub is really exciting! Our system admin has been trying to add it to our SharePoint account and keeps getting an error maintenance message that states the issue will be resolved by January 2022. Could you share more specifics? We'd like to start testing the hub ASAP. Thank you.

[KT_soh-50]

I am confused as to how this will be functional for more than 1 employee. Am I supposed to create one of these pages for each new hire?