Retail Employee Onboarding Checklist

New employees who are offered a well structured onboarding program are 69% more likely to remain in the company for up to 3 years. Unfortunately, most retail firms don’t have a proper onboarding process in place. Many companies are informal or distant about the way they induct new employees, which results in statistics like:

•     Half of all senior outside hires fail within 18 months in a new position
•     Half of all hourly workers leave new jobs within the first 120 days

Failures like these can be avoided with a good onboarding system. According the SHRM onboarding research paper, Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success, good onboarding was found to lead to:

• Higher job satisfaction
• Organizational commitment
• Lower turnover
• Higher performance levels
• Career effectiveness
• Lowered stress

Let’s jump into this retail employee onboarding checklist to help ensure your new hire successfully integrates into your company with ease. 

Learn more about employee onboarding with Process Street.

Before the onboarding process can begin, you’re required to prepare any necessary paperwork and information before your new hire’s first day. You can start preparing this paperwork by recording the following information in the form field below: 

When hiring a new employee you need to remember the basics – all forms must be intact and passed on to the HR department. Save copies of these vital forms using the form fields below.

W-4 Form 

 File will be uploaded here 

I-9 Form 

 File will be uploaded here 

Intellectual Property and Assignment Agreement 

 File will be uploaded here 

Non-Disclosure Agreement 

 File will be uploaded here 

If you require some examples of the necessary forms, see below.

1. Intellectual property and assignment agreement (Customizable example)
2. Non-Disclosure agreement (Customizable example)

You can also edit what paperwork you want to upload during this onboarding process by adding the workflow to your library and clicking ‘Edit.’ 

Once you’ve provided the new hire with their company email, you can send a welcome mail to this address. This can also be an opportunity to remind them of their start date and keep them interested in this new position. 

Next up, you need to add your employee to any email lists you have for the rest of the team.

If your internal mailing list is powered by MailChimp or another similar service, you are likely to be familiar with the process already.

If not, it’s highly recommended to use Mailchimp for both internal notifications and marketing campaigns.

An alternative to email is Slack, which is what we use to keep our employees at Process Street in the loop.

If your company uses Slack, you can go ahead and invite your new employee with their company email address. 

One stage of the onboarding process should be getting the new employee well-acquainted with their co-workers.

Throwing a welcome event is a great way to do this, so add a date in the company calendar for this. 

When assigning a mentor, be clear about their roles. Identify the criteria and expectations to ensure the mentor is fully aware of their duties. Record the assigned mentor with the form field below.

Don’t follow the job title hierarchy or pick a person with a higher job title or a person that has been in the company the longest.

Instead, it’s best to find a person who knows the most about the tasks regardless of their job title. Tasks for mentors might include:   

⚡️ You could automate this step by setting up an integration with Slack 

You should let the rest of your team know that a new teammate will be arriving shortly. Sending an email is a great way to ensure they know to welcome a new face to the team. 

Add the recipients who should be informed about this new hire’s arrival. These recipients should be added in the ‘Cc’ section of this email widget. 

An employee handbook is an excellent way to help your new hire understand your company culture and the relevant information for their role.

If you have a handbook, you can include it into Pages and provide the link in this workflow to help provide the new employee with easy access.

These tasks should be completed by the end of the employee’s first day. 

Five9 recommends you to follow this process for an introductory session that will make new hires feel at home:

The goal of the introduction session is to introduce everyone and create an awesome environment.

When this is done, they should feel ready to get on with their first assignments.

(Source: smallbusiness.chron.com & tmcnet.com)

To get a better idea of the company you’re working for, you can read through the employee handbook. Here are the sections you should be paying attention to. You can tick each one off once you’ve finished reading through the relevant section. 

{{form.Employee_handbook}}

A full tour lets new employees feel comfortable in the area while giving them a chance to meet their co-workers.

During the tour (perhaps using your phone) tick off the below sub-checklist items to make sure you don’t miss anything.

(Source: welcome.mit.edu)

These tasks should be completed by the end of the employee’s first week. 

It’s crucial to give your new hire a sense of direction. Setting objectives is a great way to help them understand what they’re ultimately working towards. 

Go deeper into the key ideas laid out by the mission statement and explain the goals and objectives of your company. 

This includes the value you try to provide to customers and employees, as well as the job performance standards you try to maintain.

You can use Pages to construct your mission statement and performance standards. From here, you can share the link below for easy access. 

{{form.Mission_statement_and_performance_standards_link}}

This is the link you can use to access the company’s objectives. This can help provide you with a better understanding about what your role is and the responsibilities you should be upholding.

Tick each subtask off once you’re read the relevant topic: 

If you use a landline telephone system, make sure your new employees are familiar with the system including:

You can do this through a training session, which you can schedule below: 

In the event that something goes wrong, you need to also let your employee know who to contact and how to get through to them. Fill in the form fields below with the relevant details to then pass on.

When creating this document, it’s crucial to remember to provide: 

Pages is a great place to keep this information. You can provide a link to this information for easy access. 

List the different software and hardware they will need to use so your employee can check off what they already know.

This is the perfect time to create your own sub-checklist! 

We’ve provided a few basic items in the one below, but go through and edit it to your specific requirements.

Address training for any new systems over a meeting

Tasks should be completed within the employee’s first month of employment.

After the employee has been trained you need to assign them to their first task.

Possible onboarding projects might include:

• Managing the register for a fixed amount of hours
• Handling orders and deliveries
• Managing a department
• Helping with customer returns

Plan this project in the form field below and ensure you cover the following when detailing this assignment to the new hire:

The goal of a performance review is to provide feedback on what the employee is doing right and what needs improvement. In your performance cover these areas:

You can use this new employee performance evaluation form as an example.

(Source: businessnewsdaily.com)

You can then create a document detailing the topics labeled above in Pages and link it below: 

Once you’ve completed this performance review, you can schedule a meeting with your new hire to provide feedback on their first project.

Now that the onboarding process is complete, your new hire should be working with limited supervision. Nonetheless, you should continue communication with them to ensure you’re providing direction. Here are some things you could cover with them moving forward: 

• Talya N. Bauer – Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success
• Impact Instruction Group – Balancing High-touch & High-tech Strategies 
• Vinay Patankar – How to Manage Small Business Calendars in the Cloud 
• Brian Harris – How to Onboard a New Retail Employee
• Inc.com – What to Include in Employee Handbook 
• Graham Winfrey – 3 Startup Tips From a Founder Who Sold His Startup for $500 Million
• Vinay Patankar – How to Use Evernote for Business Document Management
• Patrick Hull – Answer 4 Questions to Get a Great Mission Statement 
• Vinay Patankar – Attach Files and Images to Checklists 
• Richard Feloni & Mike Nudelman – How To Dress Like A Leader In Any Work Environment
• Financial Ombudsman Service – Policy and Procedures for Employee Expenses 
• Vinay Patankar – Optimize Process Driven Teams with Process Street 
• Vinay Patankar – The Best CRM for Small Businesses (Cloud / SaaS) 
• Jacquelyn Smith – How Much Coworker Socializing Is Good For Your Career?
• Marlo Hertling – Improving Employee Onboarding for Retail and Beyond
• Mohit Garg – New Employee Orientation for Retail Store Associates
• lexmark.com – Employee Onboarding for Retail
• Anne Obarski – 7 Ways to “On Board” Your Retail Employees
• Vladik Rikhter – 4 Steps for Onboarding a New Employee
• Lessonly – 9 Surprising Employee Onboarding Statistics
• Kathryn Minshew – Best Practices for Performance Reviews

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