Employee onboarding SOP template

New-hire onboarding is the procedure most companies run most often and document least. This template turns “shadow someone for a week” into a repeatable playbook: what happens before day one, what the first week must cover, and how you confirm the new person actually has what they need.

Adapt the specifics — tools, names, benefits — and keep the structure. The structure is the point.

Before day one

Prepare accounts and equipment

Order hardware and create accounts at least three working days before the start date. Cover: email, SSO, payroll/HR system, the team’s core tools, and building or VPN access. Assign each item an owner — “IT will handle it” is how laptops arrive on day three.

Assign an onboarding buddy

Pick someone from the same team who is not the manager. The buddy answers the questions people hesitate to ask a manager: where things are, who to talk to, what the norms actually are.

Send the welcome note

One short email before the start date: start time, address or meeting link, what to bring, who meets them, and the plan for day one. Uncertainty before day one is the cheapest anxiety you’ll ever remove.

Day one

Orientation essentials

Keep it human-sized: workspace tour (or remote-tooling tour), introductions to the immediate team, and the two or three policies that genuinely matter on day one — security basics, communication norms, working hours. Everything else can wait.

Access verification

Before the day ends, have the new hire log into every system on the accounts checklist and confirm each one works. Broken access discovered on day four costs a week of momentum.

Week one

Role training

Assign the playbooks that define the role — the procedures they’ll run, the tools they’ll use, the customers or stakeholders they’ll serve. Sequence them: two or three per day beats twenty on day two.

First real assignment

Give a small, real, shippable task by day three — one with an owner waiting on the result. Nothing teaches the workflow like the workflow, and nothing signals trust like real work.

Week two and the 30-day check

Expanding scope

Add the adjacent procedures: escalation paths, cross-team handoffs, on-call or rotation duties if any. The buddy stays available; the manager holds a short check-in at the end of each week.

The 30-day conversation

A structured check at day 30: what’s working, what’s confusing, what’s missing from this onboarding playbook. Feed the answers back into this document — every new hire should make it better for the next one.

Quiz — confirm the essentials

Close the onboarding assignment with a short quiz. Suggested questions:

• Where do you report a security concern, and how fast?
• What’s the team’s expected response window for internal messages?
• Who approves expenses, and what’s the limit before pre-approval?
• Where does this company document procedures, and how do you propose a change?