Plan a new hire's first month so they learn the work, meet the people and understand what good work looks like.
Before you sign off the offer for your next hire, make a list of everything that person will need before they can do any work at all. Beside each item, add two notes: who arranges it, and how long it normally takes. On most teams the list includes a laptop, an email account, team chat, the shared drive, the ticketing system, the CRM, the client database, building access and software licences.
Start here because most of what goes wrong in a new hire's first week is settled, one way or the other, before they walk in. Equipment, accounts and access often take days to arrange, and many of them sit with other teams. When the requests only go in on the start date, the laptop shows up partway through the week and access follows after that.
Take Aziz (an invented example), who joined on a Monday. The laptop came on Wednesday. Access to the ticketing system took until the following week, and the client database a further week on top of that. For his first three days he sat in a meeting room going through old reports while he waited for someone to be free. What stayed with him from that first week was mostly people saying sorry to him.
No one set out to give Aziz a week like that. Onboarding tends to slip because it is not any one person's job and everyone has a full diary. The first month shapes how soon a new person starts contributing and how they feel about their decision to join. A poor start is costly for the whole team, and in almost every case it can be avoided.
As soon as the candidate accepts, start every request on your list. Have all of them sent in the same week the offer is signed, which gives the other teams the days they need.
Two more jobs belong before the start date. One is choosing a buddy: someone on the team other than the manager, who the new hire can go to first with small questions during the first month. These are questions like where the printer is, how meeting rooms get booked, or whether a certain client emailing at midnight is normal. People in their first weeks are often reluctant to take questions this small to their manager, and a buddy gets round that. Pick a patient person and spell out what you would like them to do over the month.
The other job is a short note to the new hire, sent a few days ahead of the start date. Tell them where to go, when to arrive, who will be there to meet them and how the first day will run. Writing it takes around ten minutes, and it takes away much of the nervousness people feel on a first morning.
Aim for two things in week one. The new hire gets to know the people they will rely on, and they complete a small piece of real work.
Keep introductions targeted. Choose the particular colleagues whose work links up with the new hire's, and skip the single tour of the whole company. Book each introduction as a brief one-to-one meeting. People remember the colleagues they had a conversation with, so this works better than a group lunch. For Aziz, a better first week would have included time with his teammates, the warehouse lead who sends the client data, the finance contact who deals with billing queries, and Daniel.
A real task is genuine work that matters, small enough that the new hire can complete it within the first week with some help. Training exercises do not qualify. Two kinds that work are answering three routine client queries while the buddy reviews the replies, and checking one week's report figures against the source data. Completing actual work lets the person feel useful, and it shows you early on where they will need support.
Book two short one-on-ones, one on day one and one at the end of the week. Use the same three questions in both:
What's going well? What's confusing? What do you need?
On day one, also open the shared one-on-one document described in Lesson 2.3.
From the second week, hand over real work that is theirs to own, and be clear about what a good result looks like. Lesson 3.1, "Delegate outcomes, not instructions", gives you the five-part brief for setting this up. Lesson 3.2, "Match your involvement to their experience", helps you decide how much authority they have and where the checkpoints sit. A new hire has little experience with nearly every task at first, so build in more structure and more check-ins than you would for others on the team.
Somewhere in the first week or two, give them the team's written working expectations, covered in Lesson 4.2, "Write down the expectations you assumed were obvious". Without a written version, newcomers usually find out a team's unwritten rules by breaking them.
Across the whole first month, meet one-on-one more often than you normally would, at least once a week, and carry on using the shared document.
When the month is up, ask the new hire what was confusing, what was unclear and what was harder than it should have been. Someone new notices gaps the rest of the team no longer sees, because people stop noticing the problems in things they know well. Newcomers pick up on documents that are out of date, processes that only make sense from the inside, and jargon that nobody explained.
Wei Ling put this question to Aziz at the end of his first month, and he came back with six things. One was the client handbook, which mentioned a system the company had dropped a year earlier. Another was that two people had told him opposite things about how to log escalations. A third was that no one had mentioned the warehouse data comes in on Fridays. Each of the six would have caught out the next hire, and several were already causing trouble for the existing team.
Record what the new hire tells you and fix as much as you can before the next person joins, so each round of onboarding is better than the one before.
Start with the first part: list everything a new hire on your team needs before they can do any work, and who on your team or elsewhere arranges each item.
List every account, tool and introduction a new hire on your team needs, and write down who arranges each one.
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