This explains our Trello board for new employee onboarding. The board can be found here:

Onboarding New Employees

Onboarding should give the employee self-directed tasks to understand the team, the culture, the product, the industry, and the competition. New employees should be given the sense that we’re an organized team with a mission, goals, and values. Managers should be able to track the progress of the new employee without spending redundant time in meetings, ensuring that all meeting time is quality, human-centric, and personal.

The onboarding process

When it’s decided a new employee will be hired, it’s best for each manager or member of the leadership team to sync and identify which cards they’ll be responsible for. That person will then flesh out the card and review it to make sure it’s up to date, then add themselves as the “member” of that card to track its progress.

Pre-Launch

Before the employee is hired, we should ensure they have full access to early tools and password sharing systems. This way, on day 1, they’re ready to go and won’t have to bounce back and forth with management to get basic things done.

Also, this allows employees to get a head start on certain cards if they want (hint: This is a huge sign of an engaged, proactive employee).

Week 1

Week 1 is about introductions to your manager, a brief all-team introduction, and getting set up with tools.

Week 2

Week 2 is about understanding how we communicate and work together. It’s also a time to meet contemporaries on your team. So a salesperson would have a few calls with a colleague in sales.

Week 3

In week 3, we spend more time learning the specific product and do a “ride along” with a colleague in the new hire’s role. So a new salesperson would sit in on a sales call, a new marketer would sit with their contemporary as they set up a campaign, or similar.

Weeks 4+

Week 4 is about meeting with the heads or colleagues in other teams now that we have more context about where we fit in the industry. (A salesperson meeting with an engineer before understanding the lay of the land would be out of order).

Trello Variables

Note this can be adapted to Notion or another Kanban-style system that can re-frame views by any of the following variables:

Team

New employees should be familiar with what each team does. Here, I have the teams denoted as Product + CS (help the new hire understand our product and our customers), Sales + Marketing (Understand how we communicate and sell our product), Administrative + Internal (meeting style, security, privacy, communications, etc), and Employee’s Role (for most this will be engineering, and should be more in-depth for employees of the aforementioned teams).

In the Trello board, teams are denoted by lane.

Person responsible

The board should be helpful in self-directed onboarding. If the new hire has a question about a card, they should easily be directed to the person responsible for this card. Therefore, the “Member” section of each card is noted as the supervisor for that card.

When prepping the board for a new hire, the card having an “Assignee” signifies that the person has reviewed the card and ensured all relevant info is attached and it’s ready to go.

Timeline

Onboarding takes time. Each task is broken down by week. Pre-launch, week 1, week 2, etc.

The timeline is contained in the Labels field.

To keep the board manageable, new hires should use the filter function by the week that they’re on, so they only see the cards expected of them that week. Filter by selecting the “filter” button on the top-right or by pressing “F” anywhere on the screen in Trello.