Employee onboarding template

Every new employee goes through onboarding—but the employee onboarding process is so much more than a list of tasks. It’s your opportunity to make a first impression—a precious chance to prepare employees for their new job, establish metrics for success, and make new team members feel like they belong at your company. 

An effective onboarding experience has never been more important than it is now. With burnout and imposter syndrome on the rise, companies are looking for any way to make new employees feel welcome. Enter: the employee onboarding template.

Why use an employee onboarding template? 

An employee onboarding plan template is a way to standardize the onboarding process for every new hire. With a unified program, you can ensure team members have the information they need to succeed from day one. 

Streamline the process

An onboarding checklist template is just that—a checklist of the things your new employee needs to do and read in order to get set up in their new role. An effective template collects all of this information in one place so your employee doesn’t need to remember it themselves. When created in a project management tool, onboarding templates can also help you save time and automate workflows. 

Give team members the information they need to succeed

Giving new hires the tools for the job is critical. When you clarify your expectations for hires during their first week, first month, and even first year at your company, you give them a clear understanding of what they need to succeed. 

This doesn’t just benefit the new hire—it also increases employee satisfaction in the long term. When employees know what’s expected of them, they’re less likely to experience negative workplace emotions like burnout and imposter syndrome. According to our research, burnout and imposter syndrome—which disproportionately affect younger workers—cause low morale, miscommunication, a lack of engagement at work, more mistakes, and even attrition.

Make virtual team members feel welcome

Having a clear employee onboarding template is especially important for remote onboarding. Your remote employees won’t have as much face time with you or their virtual team. Making it clear what they need to do, where they should communicate, and how they can immediately begin making an impact will empower them—no matter where they live. 

This is doubly important for employees who work in different time zones. If you can’t be online when they are, it’s even more critical to give new hires a clear list of to-dos to help them get started on their own.

Onboarding is a pivotal moment for making employees feel included from day one. It sets the tone for a person’s tenure at your company, laying the foundation for their knowledge of and experience working for your company. This is why building an inclusive onboarding experience is so important to creating an inclusive company culture.”

Asana’s employee onboarding template

By seriously investing in the onboarding process, we believe that we can give our new hires the best leg up for their new roles. A big part of that is creating visibility and giving each new hire a clear understanding of what the onboarding process will look like. 

This isn’t your average employee onboarding template. Our employee onboarding template includes some of the key things we do at Asana to make our employees feel welcome from day one. Each new hire gets a new employee onboarding checklist, which is modified by their manager before they onboard to include any relevant job information, such as information about meetings, check-ins, projects, and onboarding tasks. 

Creating this central source of information—and making it actionable—gives the employee a clear sense of what they should be doing from the start. It unlocks a great pre-boarding and onboarding experience by streamlining where new hires need to go for information. This makes it easy for them to find important company documents and job information like their job description, new hire paperwork, company policies, and employee handbook information.

Key elements of an employee onboarding template

To help new hires succeed, you don’t just need an effective employee onboarding template—you also need to know how to use it. To make this template as useful as possible for all new team members, make sure to: 

• Set expectations and timelines for when and how work should be completed.

• Specify due dates for each action item.

• Transform the template into a living document that the new hire can update in real time with questions, learnings, and next steps.

• Outline the entire of the new hire’s onboarding plan from start to finish.

Integrated features

• List View. List View is a grid-style view that displays all of your project’s information at a glance. Like a to-do list or a spreadsheet, List View displays all of your tasks at once so you can not only see task title and due date, but also view any relevant custom fields like Priority, Status, or more. Unlock effortless collaboration by giving your entire team visibility into who’s doing what by when.

• Subtasks. Sometimes a to-do is too big to capture in one task. If a task has more than one contributor, a broad due date, or stakeholders that need to review and approve before it can go live, use subtasks to track this work. Subtasks are a powerful way to distribute work and split tasks into individual components—while ensuring all of those smaller to-dos are still connected to the overarching context of the parent task. Break tasks into smaller components or capture the individual components of a multi-step process with subtasks.

• Custom fields. Custom fields are the best way to tag, sort, and filter work. Create unique custom fields for any information you need to track—from priority and status to email or phone number. Use custom fields to sort and schedule your to-dos so you know what to work on first. Plus, custom fields can be shared across tasks and projects to ensure consistency across your organization. 

• Multihoming. The nature of work is cross-functional. Teams need to be able to work effectively across departments. But too often, work lives in one place. If each department has their own filing system, work gets stalled and siloed. With multihoming in Asana, you can reduce duplicative work and increase cross-team visibility by adding tasks to multiple projects. See tasks in context, view who’s working on what, and keep your team and tasks connected.

Recommended apps

• Zoom. Asana and Zoom are partnering up to help teams have more purposeful and focused meetings. The Zoom + Asana integration makes it easy to prepare for meetings, hold actionable conversations, and access information once the call is over. Meetings begin in Asana, where shared meeting agendas provide visibility and context about what will be discussed. During the meeting, team members can quickly create tasks within Zoom, so details and action items don’t get lost. And once the meeting is over, the Zoom + Asana integration pulls meeting transcripts and recordings into Asana, so all collaborators and stakeholders can review the meeting as needed.

• Gmail. With the Asana for Gmail integration, you can create Asana tasks directly from your Gmail inbox. Any tasks you create from Gmail will automatically include the context from your email, so you never miss a beat. Need to refer to an Asana task while composing an email? Instead of opening Asana, use the Asana for Gmail add-on to simply search for that task directly from your Gmail inbox. 

• Microsoft Teams. With the Microsoft Teams + Asana integration, you can search and share the information you need without leaving Teams. Easily connect your Teams conversations to actionable items in Asana—without having to leave Teams. You can also create, assign, and view tasks during a Teams Meeting without needing to switch to your browser.

• Slack. Turn ideas, work requests, and action items from Slack into trackable tasks and comments in Asana. Go from quick questions and action items to tasks with assignees and due dates. Easily capture work so requests and to-dos don’t get lost in Slack. 

Frequently asked questions about employee onboarding templates