Creating runbooks for onboarding and offboarding people

The onboarding and offboarding process can be somewhat overwhelming in a busy workplace, for both the employee and for the company. With a multitude of tasks to complete in order to onboard someone new or remove someone from the team, accidentally skipping steps can become a risk for the company.

Runbooks are a company's best friend when it comes to completing a set of tasks when an event occurs, such as a new hire.

A runbook used in the on and offboarding process would essentially be a set of tasks for the company and/or the employee to complete during this process. This can be used every time someone joins or leaves the team and adjustments can be made depending on the person’s role. Keeping these processes smooth, efficient and organised becomes much easier when the same set of tasks are being completed each time. It also allows for the employee themselves to be able to follow an already established “guide” during their for becoming a part of the team or moving on from the team.

Keeping your company secure is also made easier with these runbooks. On top of the tasks to get settled in, security must be maintained and established with new people joining the team. This includes appropriately assigning access to required systems and software, acknowledging security policies and other measures the new hire needs to take to ensure they’re prepared to work in a secure environment.

For people leaving, measures must be taken to ensure the information they have had access to is kept secure and appropriate access is revoked. The runbooks can be adjusted depending on the role a person is coming into or leaving to ensure the tasks are appropriate for the role, i.e. the level of access the role requires. The on and offboarding runbooks will allow for these security-related tasks to be included and will mitigate the risk of these being overlooked.

Onwardly’s runbook feature provides a place to store, manage and action your runbooks so that you can have peace of mind knowing there are planned procedures ready to be used whenever they’re needed.