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The Small HR Team Onboarding Guide (+6 Free Templates)

The Small HR Team Onboarding Guide (+6 Free Templates)

Smaller teams generally have lower capacity. If you have a small human resources team, you’ll know that already. You’ll also know retention is a big problem – and hits harder – when you have fewer HR employees (and less time).

This post explains how small HR teams can save time when onboarding. We’re built a bunch of custom HR templates for you to use. Learn how Process Street can make optimizing your small HR team a breeze. 

This article covers:

The biggest challenges your small HR team faces

Being a small HR team in a small business is your biggest challenge.

That means:

  • Trying to make sure you’re onboarding effectively in less time;
  • Having enough HR staff to make plans to retain new hires.

With this in mind, a common question HR managers have is…

How can small HR teams effectively onboard new hires?

They can optimize their processes to speed up onboarding. Click on the links below to get straight to the time-saving templates:

Let’s look at these solutions one by one.

What can you do for new hires on day one?

You need to make the new hire’s first day a productive one.

Before you begin, think of how your first day in a new job went. Do you wish someone had provided you with the following:

  • A convenient overview of your first project;
  • Your first 90 days planned out in detail;
  • A reading list of training materials.

If you want to be even more effective, be ready before day one. We have a handy template that covers what to do after the job offer letter is signed, but before a new hires’ first day.

As a matter of fact, you can try The Tiny HR Team’s Guide to Employee Onboarding Template here:

How can you make employee onboarding highly effective?

Onboarding can be highly effective by giving new hires a 30-60-90 day plan. Surprisingly, this doen’t need to be an intensive process that monopolizes your time. A plan like this helps to provide structure for new employees, and will allow them to be productive and focus on goals.

The SMART system is a great model for structured, successful goal-setting. SMART stands for goals that are:

We’ve used SMART goals to create our 30-60-90 day plan for new hires template. It can be used by both you and your new hire.

Setting up a repeatable process (like this 30-60-90 day plan template) cuts out excessive paperwork & helps you reduce manual tasks. It also means new hires can be onboarded remotely using a smartphone.

As a result, by letting the new hire serve themselves, you can save yourself time. Similarly, it’s been found that 40% of organizations spend time on tasks that could be achieved with employee self-service.

For this reason, get your 30-60-90 Day Plan for New Hires Template here:

How should you onboard remote new hires?

You can do it quickly with the help of ready-made templates. 

Our first suggestion is to provide the new hire with a remote daily work schedule. This can help new hires become familiar with their role and how to prioritize their most important tasks.

A properly constructed workflow can also include the employee’s current details. This means if they make changes to their phone number or address, you’ll be informed immediately. You can also use variables to enter the information into other relevant documents. This helps to eliminate repetitive data entry.

To demonstrate this, we have a custom-made template that can take you through the process from start to finish. Help yourself to the Onboarding Remote Employees Checklist here:

Can small HR teams onboard better than large teams?

Small teams can learn and automate faster than big teams. They can also be more personable whenever a new hire joins the company.

Employee communication is essential to increasing new hire retention, and that’s the whole point of good onboarding. Using clear communication leads to clear socialization (which is the process of new hires adjusting to their environment).

As a result, this will enable new hires to locate mentors and helpful connections themselves. For instance, in our employee onboarding workflow checklist, we suggest encouraging new hires to socially interact with their team.

Get the Employee Onboarding Workflow here:

How can you support new hires and free up time?

In a small HR team, you’re always pushed for time and feeling understaffed.

For this reason, the best way to solve the problem is to start using optimized workflows. With this in mind, we’d like to point out that Process Street facilitates small HR teams to free up time by providing optimized workflows.

“The job of the small group facilitator is to make the group’s task easier – to help a group accomplish its purpose by using appropriate and functional process.”

– Judith A. Kolb, Small Group Facilitation: Improving Process and Performance in Groups and Teams

Why use optimized workflows?

With your recurring tasks automated in a workflow, you can dedicate time to delivering a superb onboarding experience – and Process Street provides you with all the tools you need.

“If people don’t have the training, tools, support and time to do onboarding well, they won’t.”

– George Bradt

To emphasize the above quote, in our HR strategic plan template, we encourage HR to think about where they are and where they would like to be in the future.

This is done by identifying gaps between future needs and current capability. For instance, make your plans like a good chess player. Think ahead to save time.

By all means, use our HR Strategic Plan Template to get started:

Can Pages help small HR teams save time?

As well as using online workflows to save time, you can store your processes where anyone can access them. Our free-forever product known as Pages will allow you to do this and a whole lot more.

For example, Pages also lets you easily share all of your company’s documents with your teams. So, you’d save all that time that’s usually wasted on photocopying and mailing out documents, and get a jumpstart on onboarding by sharing training guides with your new hire even before their first day.

In short, Pages is a way of keeping company documents in a centralized location.

In the long run, this is far safer than keeping documents in a physical form. Just think of all the times that essential paper documents have been misplaced, or needed to be used by more than one person at once.

You could save all of your most useful documents in Pages such as:

By allowing access to documents via smartphones, you can free up even more of your time. You can say goodbye to time-consuming repetitive tasks and concentrate on more important issues, such as strategic planning.

Reinvent onboarding with process management software

Process Street understands how the employee onboarding process can be automated and streamlined (if you don’t believe me, check out one of our many employee onboarding workflows).

So, let me walk you through exactly how the employee onboarding templates throughout this article will help you scale people operations effectively in your team.

Easily automate recurring tasks

Automating your recurring, manual tasks will help you to make the most of your small HR team and allow you to focus on what really matters, like giving your new hires a great experience.

And best of all, it can all be easily done with our no-code software!

Structure your work to make it easier

You can structure your onboarding process with our workflows.

In addition, an HR manager can easily track employee onboarding progress and make sure all processes are followed in the right order. This is possible with stop tasks that ensure delegated tasks are carried out correctly.

To see this in action, check out the video below:

Our process management software could also be doing the work of full-time employees for you. Try our free demo to see for yourself!

You can also attend our automations webinar from the comfort of your office chair:

Save even more time with our automations

Our automations can save you a lot of time! They work by passing data to and from other apps, and by doing so, they reduce the time typically spent manually copying/pasting information. This not only reduces errors, but also helps your team to become more time-efficient as a result.

The automations can be used with many platforms including:

For example, see our Employee Onboarding With Automations Template below:

Do you work in a small HR team? We’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments section below. Please also let us know what you think about our free Process Street demo!

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Mark Jones

Mark Jones is a content writer at Process Street.

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