How to Create an Onboarding Site for Google Workspace
Onboarding is an integral process for any organization hiring new employees. When the HR department looks to streamline the process and provide instructions, an onboarding portal is an efficient solution.
About Onboarding and Training Employees Online
A well-structured onboarding system can help new hires get up to speed quickly and efficiently. This is especially important in the age of remote and hybrid working cultures. Having a stable, ever-present, onboarding intranet provides a reliable knowledge base to new employees. It typically involves providing the employee with the resources and information they need to be successful in their role, such as training, orientation, and access to company systems and tools. Moreover, onboarding portals help oncoming staff to become familiar with Google Workspace apps. This has a positive effect on the adoption of applications and therefore engagement in the community.
Contacts served by a directory or org chart are especially helpful to newcomers. Fostering internal communications starts at this introductory level. When an onboarding portal is connected to a larger company intranet, it encourages access to a wide variety of resources available on the Google Cloud. Consider intranet examples to get started building a workplace environment that's domain secured.
Steps for Creating an Employee Onboarding Site
Define the onboarding mission. What are the goals for the onboarding program? What do you expect employees to reasonably manage to learn? Plan pages around culture, productivity, departments and a solid timing.
Create a timeline. It's usually helpful to break down tasks into daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually. How long will your onboarding process take? Develop an outline and consider peer review.
Identify key stakeholders. A steering committee ensures the internal onboarding site isn't just a one-person perspective. Often there are different expectations levied by departments like HR, IT and Operations to consider. Identify the key stakeholders and their roles in the process.
Develop onboarding content. If your company is running Microsoft 365, SharePoint may be the obvious choice for a onboarding CMS, but Google Workspace is quite different. Google Sites excels at bringing together all the other important applications to the employee's fingertips. A template is simply the fastest way to get your onboarding online, so consider that a nice shortcut. What materials will you provide to new hires during onboarding? This may include employee handbooks, training manuals, company policies, and other documents. Create or gather the content you need and make it available to new hires. Consider an onboarding checklist if you are at a loss for ideas or inspiration.
Set up responsible parties and workflows. A mentor and checkpoints will help keep the recruits on your platform confident. Make sure superiors and department heads are informed by submissions, like through Google Forms or Apps Script automations.
Provide opportunities for buy in. Use Google Spaces, Google Chat and Google Groups for Business whenever possible to keep things social on the intranet.
Overall, an onboarding project site is like any other Google Sites intranet, so consider our ultimate guide to intranet building here.
