Onboarding is the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary skills, knowledge, and behaviors to become effective organizational members and “insiders.” Onboarding is a shared responsibility between Human Resources, the new employee, the manager, other members of the department, and strategic partners the new employee will be collaborating with. In other words, onboarding is a community effort!
Onboarding is not just about the employee’s first day on the job. Rather, it begins when an employee has accepted employment and continues through their entire first year at Emerson.
An effective onboarding process will help your new hires feel more valued, better understand their roles, and increase their productivity and performance, resulting in increased engagement.
Note: Some of this information may be different depending on the type of employee you are onboarding. Temporary and Contingent employees do not go through the full orientation process.
Important Workday Steps
After the pre-hire steps are completed in Workday, pre-hire moves to the Hire business process. This occurs after the background check is completed.
Managers have two tasks to complete:
- Onboarding Setup: This step allows the manager to add a welcome note and indicate campus partners you’d like the new hire to meet. These items will display on the dashboard when the new hire logs in to Workday.
- Questionnaire: This step allows the manager to indicate equipment needs, such as a computer. A ticket will kick off to IT once the manager completes this task.
The new hire will receive an email to their personal email address to log into Workday. The temporary username and password are sent separately. Their onboarding steps in Workday include:
- Entering personal information and legal name. This triggers the Emerson account creation process.
- Policy review and acknowledgment
- Initial I-9 steps
- Pay allocation
Creating an Onboarding Plan
Onboarding a new team member well is crucial to their success. Onboarding is a shared responsibility between Human Resources, the new employee, the manager, other members of the department, and strategic partners the new employee will be collaborating with.
An onboarding plan should be balanced between:
- Technical skills: skills, knowledge, and access needed to perform their job
- Organizational information: what pieces can help someone learn about working at Emerson, the culture, values, and brand of the College and individual departments
- Relationship-building opportunities: meeting new people, attending a staff forum or a learning event
When creating an onboarding plan, think about these questions:
- What are the most important things they need to know on their first day, during the first week, and first month?
- What important things do they need to know based on the cycle of our year and when do they need to know them?
- What are things specific to our department that may not be covered elsewhere?
- Who will they be working with closely right away?
- Who will they partner with outside of the department?
- Which team members can assist with parts of the onboarding plan?
- What meetings or recurring calendar invites do they need information about?
Once you have an onboarding plan created, share it with your entire team and collect their input. Did you miss anything? Ask for volunteers to help execute the plan. Think about how to document and store the plan so that you can use it again in the future.
Resources to Help Create Onboarding Plan
- Printable Onboarding a New Team Member checklist
- New Staff Email series - sent from Human Resources through the first weeks and months
- Academic Calendar
- Your calendar and department calendar