Automating your onboarding tasks with Personably ✨

Today we’re releasing an update to tasks in Personably. In this post we’ll take you through the problem being solved with tasks, how it works and how it fits into our vision of changing the way teams handle their people operations 🚀

Google Sheets, Trello boards, pen and paper - we’ve seen it all! The endless ways in which teams manually handle their onboarding checklist. Here’s how they usually go down:

1. Send the hire a welcome email after their offer has been accepted. Copy the template from Word doc into your Gmail. Make sure you change all the placeholders!  😬
2. Log into G Suite and create the hire’s email account. Oh, while you’re there, remember to add them to all the Google Groups they need (e.g. engineering@personably.co) 🤔
3. If they’re sales, create an X account. If they’re support, invite them to Y account. If they’re… 😴

… and repeat for every new hire starting! 😅

Don’t get us wrong - manual processes work up until a point. But as you scale, they break in two ways. Firstly, they take time! With ten hires starting next week the onboarding checklist becomes endless. Secondly, they’re inconsistent. A missed onboarding email amongst everything you send that day is understandable, but it’s a poor experience for the new hire.

There’s a better way

With tasks, teams can set up automated flows to handle onboarding at scale. Think of it as IFTTT purpose-built for people teams. We hook into the tools you use, like G Suite, Office 365, Gmail, Slack, People HR and Peakon (with more coming soon!). Create a template for each of those to-dos on your list, specifying how long before or after a hire’s start date it needs to happen, and for which roles in the organisation. With emails, set up a template email and use variables for each of the key bits of information: @hireStartDate, @managerName etc. Whenever a new hire is onboarded through Personably, we’ll schedule all the tasks that need to be completed. You can choose to action these tasks with one click or you can specify that the template happens automatically. We work with whichever tools you’re using to create accounts, generate invites or send emails. You’ll receive a daily reminder of the due tasks and the tasks being automatically actioned soon! Just sit back and relax 🙌

What’s next?

We believe that smart automation is key to helping people teams scale their operations. You can’t grow a company by hundreds of people each year and not expect the manual processes to break. Automating the manual stuff helps people teams build a more thorough process and focus on the places they can make the biggest impact: getting to know their teams and enabling them to do the best work of their careers 💥

Our mission is to build the tools that help teams on that journey. Over the course of this year we’ll be releasing lots of new features, including a dashboard to help new hires navigate their first weeks and months at the company, and a feedback and analytics tool to enable companies to really understand how effective their processes are 📈

Here's a quick 3 minute video of the newly automated tasks in action 📹