What might be the best Workspace tool for an employee onboarding checklist?

[xrbbaker]

Hi folks - 

We are a small company but growing!!  Today when we onboard someone our office manager (OM) sends the new hire an email with some attachments.  The new hire takes some action like reads some docs, fills out some docs or signs some docs and then emails them back.  OM then saves them off to a folder for that new hire and then sends over another batch of docs.  This can take 3-4-5 iterations....  She has to set a reminder to follow up on the person at each step along the way.  Now imagine if she's doing this across 4 new employees at the same time as well as working on a myriad of other tasks.

This works fine for a handful of employees but as we are staring at 30-40 employees and onboarding several at a time, I'd like to automate some of this.  In particular I would like to develop something where if OM is busy, or out sick or whatever, I could just jump in to the process and ensure it moves forward.

Example:  A primitive solution might be to create a Sheet with all of the steps mapped down the sheet by row with a checkbox and a space for comments.  This could work!  We could have one tab as the template and then just copy the template over to a new tab for each new employee and rename the tab as that employee.

For those of you engorged in the Workspace world, what else comes to mind?  What other tools and/or processes??  Another benefit of this system could be if we hire additional back office personnel, they could help out on  this process much more easily than an email based model with a Word document full of instructions.

BONUS:  If I email the individual a sensitive form for them to fill out, say tax information or something with their SSN, what is the best way to have them return that document to us in a secure fashion, vs sending over email?

Thanks for any ideas!  -RB

[PriyaC]

Hi RB

Have you looked at AppSheet? It's a no-code platform (https://www.appsheet.com/) offered by Google that allows non-developers to create applications - such as emailing and approving onboarding documents, with minimal human interaction.

This is a sample onboarding app that is in the AppSheet library https://www.appsheet.com/templates/New-employee-training-resources-filtered-for-specific-roles?appGu...

[xrbbaker]

Whhuuuuuut?  🙂  So cool!  I'll check it out!  This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.  I'm sure there is a way/ways for us to streamline our existing processes.  Thanks so much!

[StephenHind]

@xrbbaker just to make sure you're aware unless you're on Enterprise Plus it's an additional cost, so you'll need to pay for each user who needs to access.

[xrbbaker]

Thank you Stephen.  I saw that as I started to check out the tool.  Before I got too far ahead of myself in building the solution before defining the problem, yesterday I tool a first pass at mapping out our as-is world.  (Partial list below.)

I think the key question is, will this tool or some other facilitate the back and forth transfer of files?  For onboarding there is a lot of that.  In a very simple improvement over our current email based system, I figure we could just set up a shared space on the google drive for each new emp, drop the blank documents in there, send them the link to the folder with instructions, and they can update the files and let us know when they are done.  We then move the files to their proper location in our back office ecosystem.  Quite a few advantages over our current email back-and-forth with that already.  However, I'm wondering how could I make it a bit more professional/elegant than an email with a link to a folder.  This is actually quite a fun investigation!  -Thank you

[StephenHind]

@xrbbaker 

I think the key question is, will this tool or some other facilitate the back and forth transfer of files? For onboarding there is a lot of that.

I've not seen any capabilities in AppSheet that offers any file handling: it's mainly a front end for Google Sheets (or another data source) to display data.  If you're familiar with MS Access then AppSheet is the tool to provide you with Forms and Reports like Access would and the tables are wither Google Sheets or another form of data store.

I don't believe AppSheet offers anything to to let you upload/share files but AppSheet has recently been updated to get Apps Script integration which could give file sharing capabilities, but t then no longer a "no code" solution.

[xrbbaker]

Our solution may be to carve out that shared space where a new hire can update and store.  Perhaps AppSheet may come into play as a way to communicate back to us the progress that is being made in completing those documents.  It might be useful for us to see they've completed 4 out of 7 tasks rather than have to email all of the updates or wait until completion to get an update.  I'll work on it.  thanks!

[user15]

The best solution is Appsheet.

[xrbbaker]

Now that I have a process to look to streamline, I'm going to start studying it.  Thank you.

[xrbbaker]

Outside of the Google ecosystem I've found a product called Monday that looks even more promising.  Thank you all.