The onboarding process for new employees can often be stressful for all persons involved. For the new hire, it’s learning company culture, personnel, and job responsibilities, and for the managers and coworkers, it’s training him or her and still completing their own responsibilities at the same time. A strategic system for this process is the fastest way to get the new employees operating independently. In addition to making sure their workstation is ready and any user accounts have been set up ahead of time, here are a few more ideas to include in your company’s onboarding system.

Checklists for Tasks and Projects

Before they arrive for their first day on the job, put together checklists for essential training that needs to be covered each day, their daily tasks, and the projects they will be handling. It ensures that no critical training points will be forgotten, and it also gives them a quick reference guide to follow when their leader is called away briefly to handle other matters. Standard Operating Procedure Manuals New employees should have a handbook to read through at the start of their job, and every task or project with multiple steps that they are responsible for needs a written standard operating procedure to follow. Additionally, they should be given a quick reference guide of usernames and passwords for every account they will need access to.

Directories

Print out the employee directory, complete with names, roles, and phone extensions. Knowing everyone’s position and role will save them a lot of time by knowing exactly whom to ask for each question they have. Also, create a directory of vendors that the employee will be working with, along with their services and contact information.

Organization

This tip isn’t just beneficial to new employees, but to everyone in the company. Being well organized is an important part of efficiency and productivity. Having all files organized logically and labeled properly will help everyone be able to access exactly what they need as quickly as possible. For a new hire who can be overwhelmed with learning the ropes, this is particularly helpful.

Flexibility

Every person brings a different personality, set of skills, and work habits to the table. Giving them the flexibility to produce satisfactory results through the way they work best, even if it differs a bit from the precedent, will demonstrate open-mindedness and encouragement of initiative. Sometimes their fresh set of eyes can even see better methods of operation than the way things had always been done, so make sure they have the freedom to respectfully question the status quo when they have good ideas for improvement.

I hope these suggestions and other best practices for onboarding new employees help eliminate the stress that accompanies the process. If you are the new employee, we’ve also written an article for you with 6 Ideas for Successfully Starting Your New Job. If you do have other best practices in this area that you’d like to share, please feel free to post them below.