Employee Onboarding

This is a checklist and flight plan for new employees onboarding.

The document provides both procedural tasks (such as opening accounts) and a depiction of the processes and assets that can help the decision-making phase of an onboarding: assigning the employee to a team, mentoring them, setting goals and evaluating results.

Requirements

The following steps give access to all confidential information in the company, so before proceeding, check that:

1. The person hiring legally started (from the present day) OR
2. There is a non-disclosure agreement running between the parties

Devices, tools and objects

• A laptop PC must be ordered in advance so that it will be available on the first day of work
• For foreign employees, a proper power cord and optionally a compatible power supply (depending on the power grid voltage) must be bought in advance
• For resident employees, coming to the office daily, the office keys must be provided ideally from the first day
• Named business cards will usually be ordered after the end of the contractual trial period
• We usually provide a branded backpack with the laptop and branded stickers for the screen lid

Pre-flight checks

An HR or Admin representative will perform the following actions:

• Open a @sparkfabrik.com account
• Add the newly created account to staff@sparkfabrik.com group
• Add the newly created account to all relevant *-team@sparkfabrik.com project/team mail groups
• Add the account to Slack and invite it on #general, #tech and #tech-support as well as on all channels related to relevant projects
• Open the Gitlab account and add it to all relevant projects
• Log into GCP using this procedure
• Open the Toggl account and make sure it can access all relevant projects
• Invite the employee to PeopleForce and ask them to review their profile information
• Invite the employee to Dipendenti in Cloud and explain to them the related policies
• Add the GitHub account of the employee (or open it if not available) to the SparkFabrik organization and relevant projects
• Add the account to the company's OpenVPN firewall (for external access)

Things to do on the first day

For the company

• HR must introduce the new employee to the resident team and, on slack #general channel, to the remote colleagues
• HR must assign a buddy (usually their team leader) to the new employee
• Tech must make sure the local development environment is working on the employee's PC
• HR must send an introductory e-mail with policies (links) about
  • Resource access
  • Time tracking
  • Employee directory management
  • Management of off/sick days
  • Google Drive folder structure and usage
  • Google Calendar configuration and conventions
  • How and whom to ask for help
  • 1:1 meetings and performance review policies
• HR must meet with the employee to make sure they got the policies and that they can correctly understand them in context
• Tech should send an introductory e-mail with information (links) about
  • Relevant starting training resources (accounts on drupalize.me or Udemy, books or playbook pages)
  • How to contribute to the projects (branching model, peer review, etc)
  • Required tools, procedures and practices one needs to know from the very beginning
• Tech and/or buddy must explain our key internal projects and self-made tools (sparkdrupal, sparkangular, sparkboard, firestarter, etc) to the employee

For the employee

What follows will be performed with the help of your buddy, if needed

• Access all the services and check if you can interact with them
• Activate two-factor auth on Gitlab
• Add SSH keys on Gitlab so you can clone the repositories
• Set your profile pictures (starting with Gravatar and checking on Gitlab, Slack, Toggl, etc) with an appropriate/decent close-up (or use the facewall shot)
• Set your e-mail signature in the format below (respect bolds)
• Set the SparkFabrik branded LinkedIn banner on the Linkedin profile

Things to do within the first week

• HR will schedule a call with the employee and their buddy to clarify onboarding goals and schedule the checkpoints
• HR will schedule a quick call to introduce the company management to the employee and vice-versa
• HR and the employee will schedule a brief talk where the employee will self-introduce to the company
• Marketing will contact the employee to choose a facewall shot (this can be used as a profile picture as well)

Things to do one month after the onboarding

• HR will survey the employee to collect feedback about the onboarding process
• If necessary, HR will arrange a meeting between the management and the employee to share general evaluations and conclude the onboarding phase

Standard formats and snippets

Standard mail signature format

SPARKFABRIK

Name Surname
Role or function

+XX YYY ZZ.ZZ.ZZZ https://www.sparkfabrik.com

Role or function can be:

• Software Developer
• Lead developer
• C-Level or other management/board function

When in doubt, ask your HR representative.

Branded LinkedIn banner

We ask every employee who joins SparkFabrik and who has a LinkedIn account to immediately add an Experience record, connected to SparkFabrik's company profile with the correct role and starting date.

In addition, we ask them to set the branded SparkFabrik's banner as a background photo of their profile and (not mandatory but welcome) to use the facewall shot as the LinkedIn and sparkfabrik.com email profile picture.