How to Create an Employee Onboarding Checklist: Steps & Best Practices

1 in 4 employees are unhappy with their latest onboarding experience, according to an employee onboarding report. These employees:

• Felt disengaged
• Regretted accepting the role
• Had a negative outlook on the work environment
• Shared their poor experience with others

A quarter also left their jobs!

These statistics show that for onboarding to be truly effective and positive – engaging employees and properly integrating them into your company culture – careful planning is required. And the best way to achieve this? Creating your very own structured employee onboarding checklist. In this article, we’ll explain how.

Why Should You Create an Employee Onboarding Checklist?

Developing an employee onboarding checklist ensures the process is clear and structured for both new staff and HR teams. Ticking off each step encourages efficiency and consistency while creating a positive, professional first impression for new employees.

Some of the main benefits onboarding checklists offer include:

Maintaining Onboarding Consistency

Having a structured onboarding checklist to follow helps HR staff keep the process organised and consistent, reducing the likelihood of missed steps. 

These errors create delays and compliance risks, particularly when onboarding paperwork isn’t properly completed. This leaves your organisation liable to penalties and fines, not to mention a poor reputation!

Instead, an onboarding checklist helps you manage all elements of the process, from maintaining proper legal documentation to tracking employee training progress.

It also offers clear, consistent guidance, even if your HR team changes. This creates transparency and accountability for staff and managers, allowing you to quickly identify where and why things have gone wrong, if necessary.

Improving Time-to-Productivity

A thorough employee onboarding checklist also makes the process clear for new hires. It ensures they understand expectations of the next few weeks, the role, and your company in general. That’s why new hires are 50% more productive when they go through a standardised onboarding process.

These chronological tickboxes also help new employees receive training and company policy documents in good time. All queries about the role can be resolved quickly, allowing them to become productive, thriving team members without spending a lot of time searching for basic information. 

It’s no wonder effective onboarding improves time to productivity by up to 60%! 

Boosting New Hire Engagement

New hires who participate in a structured onboarding programme are 69% more likely to stay after three years of employment. But why is this? 

Structured onboarding, guided by a checklist, creates a consistent and professional first impression of your company. It shows from day one that you’re committed to helping employees succeed in their roles. 

New hires therefore feel valued and appreciated, rather than experiencing those common feelings of first-day anxiety that can lead to cold feet.

By following a clear roadmap, new hires also know exactly what to expect. They see the path to success laid out, including how they can help achieve the company’s mission and goals.  This encourages investment in their new role, meaning new employees are more likely to commit in the long term.

What to Include in an Employee Onboarding Checklist: 4 Steps

A good employee onboarding checklist should be a structured document that includes key milestones for new hires to hit, plus the smaller tasks, documents, and resources they’ll need to achieve them. 

It’s even better if these milestones are chronological, as this approach can help you create a standardised process that properly welcomes new hires into your organisation every time.

Start creating your checklist by following these five steps:

1. Complete Onboarding Paperwork

Ensuring all onboarding paperwork is completed and signed by relevant personnel is a crucial first step for maintaining compliance. You’ll need to formally establish the new hire’s employment before their first day by providing:

• Offer letters
• Employment contracts 
• Tax File Declaration and Super Choice Forms
• Emergency contact and payroll information
• Fair Work Information Statements (FWIS)

Completing this quickly, yet thoroughly, through a structured checklist avoids delays that could prevent new hires from becoming productive team members. Slow onboarding is incredibly frustrating for new hires and also leaves skills gaps in your workforce for prolonged periods. 

However, HR teams already spend 57% of their time on administrative tasks, including onboarding paperwork. So, what’s the solution? Try swapping slow manual processes for automated workflows, delivered through effective onboarding software.

Advanced contract-creation workflows, for example, ensure that new hires need to enter details only once. Dynamic document control tools then prepopulate all forms, saving HR teams and new hires significant time. Once complete, contracts are automatically sent to candidates and all relevant departments for fast, secure approvals.

2. Provide an Employee Handbook

Once all paperwork is complete, it’s time to give new hires a copy of your employee handbook. This helps to establish clear, straightforward expectations even before day one. 

A good handbook should cover important policies, from workplace conduct to holiday request procedures. It should also include system and workspace logins, ensuring no delays are caused by a lack of access to technology on the first day!

However, employee handbooks share more than just policies. They should also describe the company’s mission, values, history, strategy, and goals. They offer a great way to begin immersing new hires in the workplace culture before they’ve set foot through the door!

Documenting employees’ receipt of the handbook also creates accountability. It shows that new hires have received the information necessary for a strong start in their roles and can be referred back to if your policies are ever questioned. 

3. Give Introductions

Automating administrative elements of the onboarding process leaves more time to spend on the more personal checklist points – ones that require human empathy and support.

Not everything will be covered in the handbook. It’s also important that you introduce informal cultural aspects to help new hires feel truly part of the team.  

Plan meaningful opportunities for interaction with their teams. Focused introductory sessions with relevant personnel give new hires the chance to ask questions and understand how they’ll collaborate with each team member. Schedule team-building sessions, too, such as lunches or simple coffee breaks, to encourage natural connection-making.

Explain how they can communicate, whether through email, messaging services like Slack, onboarding software, or face-to-face meetings. This ensures everyone knows exactly how they’ll contribute to the company’s overall success.

These activities immediately begin building trust between new hires and the existing workforce. Employees who feel a sense of belonging are 56% more productive and 50% less likely to leave!

4. Start Tailored Training

65% of employees say they either don’t have enough time to complete training, or the training opportunities offered don’t match their role.

That’s why role-specific training should be a key part of any employee onboarding checklist. Following programmes that cover irrelevant areas wastes time and causes employees to immediately become disengaged.

Set specific goals for each training stage, with performance targets for the first 30, 60, and 90 days. New hires who stay for those initial 90 days are more likely to remain with the company for at least one year!

At the same time, avoid overloading new hires with information. Break training down into manageable modules, delivered through your onboarding software, and create a mini unit checklist that employees can tick off at their own pace, too. 

This allows you to track their progress, see where new hires may be struggling, and provide assistance. It can also help you optimise training processes in the future to increase time to productivity!

Setting New Hires Up for Success with Structured Onboarding

Taking a systematic approach to onboarding is the best way to ensure new hires get the positive, organised start they deserve. 

It also helps HR teams maintain compliance with ease and boosts overall onboarding efficiency, creating a streamlined process that immediately engages and retains employees in the long-term. And this starts with a structured onboarding checklist.

Looking for even more ways to structure onboarding effectively? Onboard Express’s dedicated onboarding platform streamlines the entire process while enhancing the new employee experience from day one. Book a free demo today to learn more.