Employee onboarding in Jira and Confluence

After the recruitment process (which can also be embedded in the Jira system – see HERE), there comes time for the onboarding of the employee, which is often (although this is changing!) associated with communication chaos and a slight confusion of the new candidate. It is not necessarily so – the digitalization of onboarding or transfer of activities to the IT system allows for well-structured, transparent operations that can be accessed by the HR team, management, and administration. Thanks to this, the company can successfully implement the vision of onboarding the next specialist to their teams. Below, we present an example of the organization of the onboarding process in the Jira system integrated with Confluence.

Digitization of onboarding – why is it useful?

Digital employee onboarding using Jira and Confluence is divided into stages and tasks, which in turn are assigned to persons responsible for their execution. The advantages of this method include:

• A clear path of action – everyone knows when it’s their turn to do their part (e.g., the IT department knows when the new person is finished with health and safety training and expects them to come in for equipment, so they can prepare early).
• Insights into the progress of tasks related to onboarding a particular employee.
• Easy management of the company’s fixed assets – it is immediately known when and what equipment was received by the employee and how much is left in the company’s resources.
• Ability to share and archive documents.
• A digitized way to organize training.
• Shorter turnaround time for the entire process.

Step by step employee onboarding

Let’s start with possible* onboarding steps (*every company operates differently, so the same process is always a bit different for different customers; please use the following list as an example, not a rigid framework – Jira and other Atlassian solutions can be configured according to specific naming, sequence of activities and other company requirements).

Employee onboarding – steps:

1. Guided tour of the office.
2. Handing over an office access card or code.
3. Introducing the employee to their team.
4. Familiarizing employee with rules and regulations and instructions.
5. Health and Safety training.
6. Handing over a computer and a business phone.
7. Including the employee on the company intranet with a presentation of key spaces.
8. Business travel training.
9. Time reporting training.
10. Presentation of benefits and their conditions.
11. Presentation of company brand book and marketing materials.
12. An onboarding evaluation survey.

Each of these points will be reflected in the system and often also have it’s own separate, shorter sub-process, also tailored to the company’s operation.

Onboarding in Jira – what does it look like?

Closely connected with the onboarding process are Jira Asset Management and the functionality that Jira Service Management has gained by combining it with the Insight Asset Management add-on (more on this topic: Atlassian+Mindville), as well as the possibilities offered by the Confluence system and appropriately selected applications making it more attractive.

Let’s start at the beginning:

1. Starting a new onboarding process

An HR professional creates a new onboarding request in the system by filling in all the details of the hired employee. The data form may include information such as:

• HR Supervisor of a newly hired person;
• Superior;
• Company address (headquarters);
• The address of the branch office where the person will work (or information about remote working mode);
• The department to which the employee belongs;
• Position;
• Company equipment an employee should receive;
• The location of their workstation (building, room, desk);
• Whether additional information such as career aspirations, hobbies, or food allergies).

Below we present an example of an onboarding form that initiates in the system all the activities related to the onboarding of a new employee in the company (the example differs slightly from our list above because, as we mentioned earlier, the form template can be configured according to customer needs):

2. Automated creation of tasks for specific employees

Filling out the form initiating the onboarding process (see point 1), completed by pressing the “create/create” action button, automatically generates a list of tasks that make up the deployment of an employee in a given company – this is configured at the process implementation stage.

Good to know:

• The list of tasks may vary depending on, for example: the team/project the employee was hired for, position, company location, type of employment or other guidelines indicated by the company.
• The system automatically generates a list of tasks based on the information filled in by the HR team member in the first, initiating stage of the process.
• Tasks can be automatically assigned to specific employees or team leaders who will personally assign specialists to each task. It is also possible to assign tasks more generally, to a team, within which employees will assign themselves to perform given activities.

The screen above shows a simple, short list of tasks such as creating an employee account in Jira, assigning company equipment or organizing a workstation. As we mentioned in the introduction to this text, these tasks depend on company needs.

Action scenarios, settings, connections, and dependencies are defined at the beginning of the cooperation with the customer. All of them can be changed or optimized overtime if necessary.

Content of individual tasks

The individual configuration also applies to each onboarding task – different values must be completed in a request for company equipment, and different values in a task for health and safety training, for example. Each task must include the relevant information that is associated with it, and each can initiate additional needed actions to be performed and update the information in different projects after it has been performed.

Example: Assigning company equipment to an employee

The template of the task includes the type of request, the employee’s data and link to the main onboarding task and his profile in the system, the model of the laptop, a description with additional information, the person assigned to the task, the person overseeing the entire process.

Note!

The task can be created automatically, while the subsequent values should be checked by the employee. The system can, for example, assign the first available laptop in the register, and the IT department employee, after consultation with the supervisor of the newly hired person, will make the change. Introducing the step of “ordering” the equipment avoids chaos – the order must be made by an employee of the relevant department, after making sure that all the data is correct. The order will automatically update the inventory of fixed assets in the company (We would like to remind you that Asset Management in Jira is a comfortable and optimal solution).

Example: carrying out mandatory training

*Training in Jira+Confluence

Note!
We recommend our customers to integrate the onboarding process with the Confluence system, which makes it possible to communicate in a more friendly and clear way, e.g. trainings or referring employees to the information they need. Confluence integrated with the Linchpin add-on creates a modern intranet which resembles social media channels and enables e.g. the creation of events and record keeping:

Note!

Once signed up, the employee will receive a confirmation email and an event to add to the calendar.

Training can be further broken down into cycles, and these cycles can be broken down into specific training sessions on specific dates that participants are signed up for.

The team organizing the training can have a separate project in Jira+Confluence to efficiently:

• coordinate activities,
• control the costs,
• check attendance,
• and collect employee evaluations according to each event.

Training is an important factor not only for onboarding, but also for employer branding as a whole. The Atlassian environment can be customised to suit your organisation’s needs and, for example, require your manager to approve an employee’s participation in a company training course or introduce gamification elements, such as the automatic assignment of points for participation in a training course, which are then collected as a reward from the company. It also definitely facilitates cost tracking and optimal allocation of training budget for all company departments

– Katarzyna Głąb, Senior Business Analyst at Transition Technologies PSC.

3. Task performance and process flow

For a better organization of the tasks, you can divide them into different days so that you know what needs to be done in which order. An example of such a breakdown:

Task completion is also listed in the main, output onboarding submission, which might look like this:

Once all the tasks related to onboarding an employee are completed, the person coordinating the activities (usually an HR person) marks the entire collection as “Done “. Our new employee has gone through the full onboarding path 😊

Summary

In summary, onboarding in Jira + Confluence is closely related to:

• The management of the company’s fixed assets.
• The management of training and access to corporate content.

Implementing the onboarding process in the Atlassian solution ecosystem allows for:

• Integration with various other tools.
• Flexibility and customized process configuration according to company needs.
• The environment to grow and gradually add more business processes to it without having to introduce separate programs with a different interface and user experience.
• Insight into the results and reports of each project. Automations that offload repetitive tasks.
• Workflow: before implementation, a company needs to define action scenarios and information flows, which then results in a very smooth operation. All processes can be streamlined or changed over time if the company needs it.

The larger the company, the more difficult it is to control complex processes that are interrelated. Onboarding requires different people from different teams to work together and impeccable communication between them. The digitization of this process should be a priority for companies that introduce new employees long and haphazardly, receiving bad feedback from interviewees later. It’s also important for companies that are growing fast and are recruiting hard to get new people on board quickly – the faster and smoother they can get new professionals on board, the faster they can get things done for their clients. We invite to contact us all people who think that their company needs to improve the onboarding process. We are ready to help!