Employee onboarding workflow: from offer accepted to settled in

Why onboarding slips

A new hire starts Monday. On Thursday you notice the signed paperwork never came back. Nobody ordered the laptop because everyone thought someone else had. Three weeks in, nobody has asked whether they are settled.

None of this is hard work. It is remembering work, spread across HR, IT and a manager, tracked in an inbox and a spreadsheet. An onboarding workflow turns it into one record per hire that moves through the same steps every time, and stops at a person only when a person is needed.

The workflow, step by step

This is the Employee Onboarding template in RouteWrk, twelve steps, in the order they run.

1. Offer accepted. You create the hire's ticket with their name, role, start date and team.
2. Welcome email. It goes out the same day from your own email address. Attach your paperwork to it from the ticket's files and ask for it back signed; the template's wording is a starting point.
3. Status: Preparing. The status changes on its own, so the list of hires shows where each one is without anyone updating it.
4. Wait for the signed paperwork. The workflow waits up to five days for a reply.
5. Follow up on paperwork. No reply in five days, so it sends one reminder, then moves on to setup.
6. Get everything ready. A checklist: signed paperwork received, laptop ordered and set up, accounts and email created, building or VPN access, payroll, a buddy, the first week's calendar. The hire does not move on until every item is ticked.
7. First-day details. An email with where to go, who will meet them and what the first week holds.
8. Status: First Week.
9. Wait a week. Time to settle in before anyone asks.
10. Manager check-in. The manager is asked one question: is this person settled in? Yes or not yet.
11. Sort out what's missing. Not yet goes to a short checklist (the blocker, the missing access or equipment, a follow-up session); once it's done, onboarding is complete.
12. Onboarding complete. The status becomes Settled In.

What happens when the paperwork comes back

The new hire replies to the welcome email. The reply arrives in your routing inbox, where RouteWrk suggests the hire's ticket because the reply belongs to the same email thread. You link it, and the wait ends: the hire moves on to the setup checklist.

If nothing comes back, the follow-up goes out on day five without anyone having to remember it.

The template moves on to setup after one follow-up, so a slow signature does not hold up the laptop order. The paperwork is still the first item on the setup checklist, so onboarding cannot finish until it is in. If your process needs the signed paperwork before setup starts, that route is yours to change on the canvas.

What you see while it runs

Steps that need a person show up on the Kanban board, each in a column for that step: the setup checklist, the manager check-in. Every step a hire has passed through is in the ticket's history, with the emails that went out.

So the question "where is Jordan's onboarding?" has one answer, in one place, and it is the same answer for HR, IT and the manager.

Make it yours

The template is a starting point. Everything on it can change:

• Add or remove checklist items, or split IT's items into their own checklist with their own owner.
• Add an approval before day one, for whoever confirms access was set up correctly.
• Change the waits: three days for paperwork instead of five, two weeks before the check-in.
• Hand the IT setup to another workspace, so it lands in IT's own queue with the hire's details carried across.

Start from the template

RouteWrk is free to start, with no credit card. Create a workspace from the Employee Onboarding template, connect your Gmail, and create a ticket for your next hire. The HR onboarding page shows the rest of what the workflow can hold.