New User Onboarding Process

[Coby Fuller]

I'm curious how my fellow admins handle onboarding new users. The company I work for is very good at over engineering everything they touch, and we have overcomplicated our Jira customizations and processes (something I inherited). This makes it difficult for new teammates to jump right in and start being productive in Jira. I offer the Jira Fundamentals training through Atlassian University, a training video that we've created, and a word document walking through the full lifecycle of an issue and its children/grandchildren to all new users. The problem that I'm having is actually getting this in front of new users. I've attempted to format the email that is sent for Jira invitations to include links to this information, but this is a plain text email that does not accept HTML or markdown formatting. I looked into automating emails sent to new users once they have logged in for the first time, but this is not possible out of the box. I appreciate any feedback, but please don't reference the marketplace in your responses. 

[Kalin U · Accepted solution]

Here are a couple of ideas, not the actual practice at my organizations, as we are in a similar positions as yours (things do change for the better however):

• you may create a simple Welcome project and manually assign each new hire a new onboarding task; with some Automation you may even create sub-tasks depending on the parent's status, e.g. watch this video, read this document, etc.
• you may incorporate the new Forms to a Welcome project, so that when a new hire starts working, they need to complete a form (a checklist) before being deemed Successfully Onboarded.
• you may have a Confluence space with pages dedicated for each new hire based on their function.

These three options can compliment each other. I'm interested in other admins' practices and ideas.

[Coby Fuller]

Thank you for your response @Kalin U  I have not convinced our company that Confluence is the answer. Yet!! I REALLY like the onboarding project idea. This will help them get used to using Jira and also allow new hires to work together in Jira to complete their onboarding tasks. Well done! I think this idea, combined with @jazzlyn buddy system idea will work for us.

[jazzlyn]

We are full remote, so when onboarding new users we provide

* Confluence pages for new employees with basic information

* Guidelines

* especially for Jira we created Workflow diagrams for multiple views (f.e. Customer / Developer)

* Introduction meeting to show processes and workflows the new employee will have to deal with

* and the most important: each new employee gets a buddy assigned for the first weeks. this is a person that literally helps with everything related to the new working environment, usually a person experienced with the company and its processes/workflows and similar skillset/job scope

[Coby Fuller]

Thank you for your response @jazzlyn  I have not convinced our company that Confluence is the answer. Yet!! I do like your idea about the buddy system. We used this at the last company I worked for and it proved to be successful.

[Mykenna Cepek]

We use Confluence pages to cover the basics at a high-level, and provide links for further reading / viewing.

Our next stage is to use checklists in a templated set of Jira stories (one epic per new hire in a separate Onboarding project). Just a few stories (week 1, week 2, etc) containing several steps for them to complete and check off.

We use the free Issue Checklist for Jira. 

[Coby Fuller]

Thank you for your response @Mykenna Cepek  I have not convinced our company that Confluence is the answer. Yet!!

[Tanya Christensen]

Trello works great as an on-boarding tool.  https://trello.com/b/qr3AcASr/new-hire-onboarding

[James Scott]

I think this question depends on a few things, primarily, are these new hires engineers working in Jira Software...or are they service desk agents working in Jira Service Management?

General suggestions...

• Confluence space with how-to pages containing videos or gif captures for them to review on their own
  • Email notification fires on new hire request to the new hire with Confluence URL on where to go to train on Jira (Software or Service Management)
• Hiring managers need to reinforce usage of the how-to pages and assist with hands-on training for how your specific organization uses Jira...each organization is different
• You hold recurring open sessions that any employee can come with questions, enhancement ideas, and training topics for you to cover with them

[Coby Fuller]

Thank you for your response @James Scott I have not convinced our company that Confluence is the answer. Yet!!

[Johnny FromCanada]

If using company-managed projects, consider adding a new Kanban board with just three columns: To Do, Doing, Done.  Map underlying statuses to just these columns.  Keep it simple until it absolutely has to get more complicated (which should be rare IMO).

[Linda Milne_Togetha Group_]

How to videos are easy to make these days. But to be of value they do require decent scripting and focused topics.

I like the badge / certificate style approach - you need to get the relevant cert, and so need to watch the video / do the tasks.

[Anna Mitina _Stiltsoft_]

Hi @Coby Fuller 

As a lot of replies here suggested - Confluence is the best tool for onboarding. Hopefully, you were able to convince your company to switch to it.

If that's the case, we have a great app for the onboarding process called izi LMS for Confluence. It enables to create courses and quizzes in Confluence the same way you create pages and use them for training, onboarding, and compliance.

Having a learning management system could help your company to organise trainings, knowledge checks and, of course, onboarding. As soon as admins add users to the courses, they receive a notification to their email, so it would be impossible to miss the required onboarding actions.

Watch a 2-minute video

Let me know if you have any questions :)

[Julia Shcherbyna _SaaSJet_]

Hi @Coby Fuller ! Another way to simplify the onboarding process for a new employee is to set up a clear and step-by-step process.

This could be done using the add-on Business Process Manager developed by my team.

It not only makes the adaptation process more understandable for a new team member but also significantly reduces the time spent by an hr-specialist and standardizes your process.

Here is a demo version of the customized Onboarding process.

I hope this is interesting for you.

[Reinier]

If I hear you correct you have a couple of challenges:

1. Instructing new employees without using Confluence

Advise: Make a dashboard for the new user where he can find all related information (this can be captured in a Jira project [each task has the needed info like a youtube link]). Don't forget to mention how they can reach you for more questions.

2. Getting control of the growing number of varieties of working within the company.

Advise: Try to reduce the way of working to 2-3 different ways. And have people of different department to participate. The participants can also assist you in getting more adapting and embracing the idea within your company. And listen good to the feedback. And NO you can not satisfy all people. But an uncontrollable way of working is also not acceptable and may even introduce other issues (security, data leakage and so on).

I hope this helps.