New employee onboarding processes with Confluence

Documenting onboarding processes in Confluence offers a structured approach to welcoming new employees, providing them with essential information, and ensuring a smooth transition into their roles. By leveraging Confluence’s capabilities, teams can create comprehensive onboarding documentation that is easily accessible and continuously updated. Here’s how to effectively document onboarding processes in Confluence!

Create a Confluence space dedicated to new employee onboarding documentation.

Establish a dedicated Confluence space specifically for onboarding documentation. This space is a centralized repository for all onboarding-related materials, making it easy for HR teams, managers, and new employees to access and contribute to essential resources. Whether HR policies, training modules, welcome messages, or organizational guidelines, having a dedicated Confluence space ensures that vital resources are readily available, contributing to a seamless and structured onboarding experience for all involved.

You can set access to all team members, only managers, or even for only selected people, so you don’t have to worry about sensitive data.

In Confluence, you can put all relevant employee data, like accounting principles or how to track work time. In Appsvio, we also have a dedicated space for our birthday!

Link Confluence pages to Jira issues to provide detailed information for employee onboarding

Connect Confluence pages to relevant Jira issues to provide detailed information and context for onboarding tasks and activities. This integration allows teams to seamlessly navigate between Confluence documentation and Jira tickets, ensuring clarity and alignment throughout onboarding.

Make it easier for new hires and link training tasks with Confluence pages, embedded educational materials, and other resources. You can link general pages like time tracking rules to specific projects to ensure new employees can always get back to it and check if they make it suitable.

To make it more friendly, don’t forget to put into Confluence a welcome message! :)

Remember that you can (and should) also link Confluence to Jira Service Management if you use an onboarding portal.

Examples of what knowledge base you can build in Confluence:

Company Overview:

• An overview of the company’s mission, values, and culture.
• Information about the company’s history, milestones, and achievements.
• Introduction to key executives and leadership team members.

HR policies and procedures:

• Employee handbook containing detailed information about HR policies, such as code of conduct, anti-harassment policies, benefits, and leave policies.
• Procedures for requesting time off, submitting expense reports, and accessing employee benefits.

Organizational structure:

• Organizational chart illustrating the company’s hierarchy and reporting structure.
• Team directory with profiles of team members, including their roles, responsibilities, and contact information.
• Birthdays date
• User manuals

Onboarding checklist and resources:

• Onboarding checklist outlining the steps new employees must complete during their onboarding journey.
• Resources and tools to help new employees navigate their onboarding process include orientation schedules and training materials.

IT and facilities information:

• Information about IT policies and procedures, including how to request equipment, access software tools, and troubleshoot common technical issues.
• Facilities information includes office locations, parking instructions, and building access procedures.

Training and development resources:

• Training materials and resources to help new employees develop essential skills and competencies required for their roles.
• Links to online courses, webinars, and other learning resources the company offers.

Company culture and events:

• Information about company culture initiatives, employee engagement programs, and social events.
• Calendar of company events, team-building activities, and celebrations.
• Gallery of previous events, links base

Feedback and support channels:

• Channels for providing feedback and suggestions about the onboarding process, company culture, or other aspects of the employee experience.
• Support channels for contacting HR, IT, or other departments for assistance or clarification during onboarding.
• Emergency contact chart — who to contact in a specific case

🐾 Use case — employee onboarding with Confluence

At ABC Comp., a new software developer named Emily joins the team. To streamline Emily’s onboarding process, XYZ Corp utilizes the integration between Confluence and Jira Service Management, ensuring that Emily has access to the knowledge base throughout her onboarding journey.

The HR team creates a dedicated Confluence space for onboarding documentation, populating it with resources such as welcome messages, HR policies, training materials, and organizational guidelines.

Simultaneously, they set up a service desk within Jira Service Management tailored for onboarding support, creating Jira issues for each onboarding task.

The HR team links relevant Confluence pages to corresponding Jira issues, ensuring that each task in the service desk portal is accompanied by detailed documentation and resources.

As Emily begins her onboarding process, she gains access to the Confluence knowledge, and she is added as a request participant in onboarding requests on the portal. Thanks to that, she gets notifications and can monitor what stage the ticket is at. Also, she can add comments to tickets when something is bothering her, like still not having access, and the Help Desk team can check it.

She can navigate to the linked Confluence pages to access comprehensive documentation, training materials, and relevant resources, thanks to linking with Jira.

With access to the knowledge base within the Jira service desk portal and Jira, Emily gains valuable insights and guidance at each step of her onboarding journey.

By leveraging the detailed documentation and resources available in Confluence, Emily can quickly familiarize herself with company policies, procedures, and best practices, accelerating her integration into the team and minimizing the learning curve.

Confluence can streamline the entire onboarding process by acting as a centralized platform for all onboarding needs. It allows organizations to prepare engaging welcome materials, including personalized welcome messages and videos from leadership, to introduce the company’s culture and values. Confluence’s structured spaces and pages can host a wealth of resources, such as interactive training modules, company policies, role-specific guides, and organizational charts, ensuring new employees have easy access to essential information. Its collaborative features facilitate team introductions and encourage new hires to engage with their peers and managers, enhancing their integration into the team.

Eren Kalelioğlu

Activities in Jira and Confluence at the beginning to make it easier for employee

To ensure a smooth and effective onboarding process for new employees, it’s essential to implement activities at the beginning stages. These activities help new hires familiarize themselves with the company, roles, and team dynamics. Here are some key activities you can implement.

Playbook: User Manual with Confluence

User manuals are fun tools to introduce new hires and let them speak about themselves.

With this activity, the team can meet the new ones and learn how they like to work, at what time, what are preferred channels of communication, or whether they plan to go to offices or not.

You can use a ready template from the Atlassian Playbook for Confluence, Keynote, and PowerPoint.

Working Agreements

Create working agreements within Confluence to establish clear expectations, norms, and guidelines for collaboration within the team. Collaboratively draft and refine working agreements using Confluence’s editing and commenting features, ensuring input and buy-in from all team members. You can choose a whiteboard feature with many different patterns and templates.

Maintain working agreements as living documents within Confluence, allowing for continuous iteration and adaptation as the team evolves.

Roles and Responsibilities

Document roles and responsibilities within Confluence, providing new employees with a clear understanding of their role within the organization.

Create dedicated Confluence pages for each role, outlining key responsibilities, goals, performance metrics, and reporting structures. Foster transparency and alignment by linking role descriptions to team pages, organizational charts, and relevant project documentation within Confluence.

By utilizing Confluence for these activities at the beginning stages of the onboarding process, organizations can streamline information dissemination, foster collaboration, and empower new employees to integrate into their roles and the broader team quickly.

Key Takeaways: Confluence in new employee onboarding

• Dedicated Confluence Space: Establish a dedicated Confluence space for onboarding documentation, ensuring all essential resources are centralized, easily accessible, and continuously updated.
• Access Control: Utilize Confluence’s access control features to manage who can view and contribute to onboarding documentation, safeguard sensitive data, and ensure information security.
• Integration with Jira: Link Confluence pages to Jira issues to provide detailed information and context for onboarding tasks, facilitating seamless navigation and alignment between documentation and tasks.
• Comprehensive Knowledge Base: Build a comprehensive knowledge base in Confluence, covering various aspects of the onboarding process, including HR policies, organizational structure, training resources, IT and facilities information, company culture, and support channels.
• Personalized Welcome: Enhance the onboarding experience with personalized welcome messages and videos, introducing new employees to the company’s culture, values, and team dynamics.
• Interactive Activities: Implement interactive activities at the beginning stages of onboarding, such as user manual playbooks and working agreements, to facilitate team introductions, clarify expectations, and establish clear roles and responsibilities.
• Continuous Improvement: Maintain onboarding documentation as living documents within Confluence, allowing for continuous iteration and adaptation based on feedback and evolving organizational needs.

By leveraging these key takeaways, organizations can streamline the onboarding process, empower new employees to quickly integrate into their roles and the broader team, and foster a positive and engaging onboarding experience.

For more strategies with other Atlassian tools, read a free ebook! 😊