Setting Up an IT Onboarding Checklist for Clients and Employees

Having a streamlined process for onboarding clients and onboarding new employees goes a long way toward building confidence in your company. If you can’t keep clients or new workers happy, they’ll likely look elsewhere for a more productive environment. For that reason, it’s to have an IT onboarding checklist ready for preparing new clients and employees to work with your organization.

Why is Onboarding Important?

A successful new hire onboarding process can improve your chances of retaining the employee. In addition, employees who feel comfortable in their role tend to be more productive and get more engaged with the organization. That can lead to less employee churn and absenteeism. It’s one reason successful organizations rely on an IT onboarding form when they bring on a new hire.

When you put in the effort to improve and refine client onboarding, that increases your ability to retain them as a customer, which helps your company’s bottom line. In addition, taking the time to map out an automated client IT onboarding checklist process can relieve stress on project manners and increase engagement between your company and the client.

New Employee Onboarding vs. New Client Onboarding

A lot of the work of successfully onboarding a client or new employee happens before you have a conversation with either. In both cases, you must figure out who it is you’re bringing into your organization. For new employees, it’s about getting them adjusted to the position they’ll be filling within your company. Onboarding for new employees typically includes:

• Ensuring they understand their role in the organization

• Deciding how to go about training

• Going over the rules of the new hire’s department

• Getting the new employee set up at their workstation

In the case of clients, you must establish the guidelines for issues like:

• Method(s) of communication

• The kind of technology used

• Mapping out the responsibilities of each partner

• Data exchange

• Billing

When you look at them together, it’s easy to see why you need two different types of IT onboarding checklists for clients and new hires. The entire IT onboarding checklist process gets easier when you invest in quality software. That way, you can create automated workflows customized to fit different onboarding processes.

Getting Your IT Team Ready

Even if your new employees or clients have familiarity with technology, you can still run into challenges introducing them to unfamiliar software. For that reason, you should have an IT services onboarding checklist automated and ready to go.  

Preparing new employees

IT should coordinate with the HR department to ensure they have all available information to prepare for setup when it comes to new employees. When preparing your checklist, it helps to outline an IT onboarding process flowchart. With that in place, you can figure out how to set up your finalized onboarding checklist. Items that typically appear on a final IT onboarding form include:

• The equipment necessary for new hires

• Any software that needs installing on the new employee’s workstation

• Setting up approvals for new accounts

• Giving new hires access to corporate accounts and related usage guidelines

• Scheduled meetings to go over the setup of company accounts

• Digital and physical copies of hardware and software manuals

• Explanations on how to use company equipment

Preparing new clients

Client onboarding represents an opportunity to start forging a solid relationship between your two organizations. For that reason, you must make sure that your client IT services onboarding checklist covers everything necessary to bring clients up to speed, answer any questions they have, and outline a strategy to work together successfully.

Think of client onboarding as a critical business strategy, not just an afterthought. Having an automated IT onboarding and offboarding checklist helps ensure that you don’t miss essential steps in the process. In addition, it puts everything you need at your fingertips, putting you in the best position to transition the client into your organization successfully.

In addition, having an IT onboarding process already set up protects you from scope creep. Establishing boundaries from the start sets up proper expectations from the client, avoiding confusion that could jeopardize your partnership.

Other benefits of having an IT onboarding checklist prepared for clients include:

• Having a clear plan of action ready

• Making clients more open to upselling

• Allowing your organization to provide better customer service

• Encourages clients to refer your business to others

• Helps establish transparent compliance standards

New Employee IT Onboarding Checklist Examples

Below are some templates you can automate when taking new hires through the onboarding process.

Welcome Email Checklist

• Welcome new hire to the team

• State the new hire’s starting date

• Let the new hire know what time they should report and where

• Provide a contact name and phone number

• Outline documents the new employee should have ready

• Include a breakdown of the schedule for the first day

• Explain the dress code

• Attach pertinent company documents

• Link to the company employee handbook

Preparation Checklist

• Let company or relevant department know about the new hire

• Provide the name and position of the new employee

• Let company or relevant department know about the start date

• Confirm the location of the new hire’s workstation

• Order equipment necessary for new employee’s role

• Set up company accounts and email for new hire

• Order security card or keys for new employee

• Set up HR documents and welcome package

First Day Checklist

• Greet employee

• Walk employee to the new workstation

• Introduce new hire to department and colleagues

• Provide a tour of essential areas of the company

• Ensure the new hire can log into their workstation

• Set up tickets if there are issues with the new employee’s access

• Get new hire set up in their training environment

• Make sure all the new employee’s credentials work

• Provide the employee with guides, rules, and other essentials

• Set up a meeting with new employee’s superior

New Client IT Onboarding Checklist Examples

Below is an example of a template you can use for the automatic onboarding of new clients.

Information Gathering

• Get budget from the client

• Capture the client’s web URL, if available

• Ask the client what goals they hope to accomplish

• Establish business objectives

• Set up points of contact within the client’s organization

• Assign team lead within your company

• Decide on who’s responsible for executing specific responsibilities within your organization

• Outline the client’s responsibilities

Paperwork

• Collect NDA

• Sign contract

• Get copies of all signed documents

• Send W-9

• Ensure client’s information gets loaded into accounting software

• Enter the established rates in your system

• Send out the first invoice

Client Welcome

• Send all relevant onboarding documents

• Send the client an intake form

• Set up a time for a kickoff call

• Introduce team members involved in the project

• Outline who will attend the first call

• Set the agenda for the initial meeting

Establish Your IT Onboarding Workflows with Nutrient Workflow

Nutrient Workflow’s workforce management and automation software simplifies creating document and approval workflows for IT onboarding. Learn how our platform can help you standardize IT onboarding checklists for your organization by setting up a demo.