There’s a lot that happens when a new employee starts working at your business. Between the paperwork, the introductions and the schedule planning, IT onboarding can get lost in the noise.
It either happens properly or it doesn’t, and often a successful setup comes down to one thing: whether or not there’s a specified owner of the process.
Ownership is one of the most commonly overlooked parts of IT onboarding. Instead, different tasks get split between different employees and departments. Assumptions are made about who is doing what, and often you get a new starter without access to the IT tools they need.
It’s frustrating, and productivity takes a dive. Let’s look at why assigning a team member to IT onboarding is a powerful path to a seamless process.
What Does IT Onboarding Ownership Look Like?
Owning the IT onboarding process means being accountable for the entire sequence, from hardware procurement to account creation, licence assignment, security configuration and access permissions. It’s about ensuring every step is completed to the same standard, for every hire, every time.
Something important to note – obviously one person being in charge of a process requires a fallback plan. What if they’re on leave, or three people start in the same week, or a new department with no onboarding track record hires someone?
A couple of things help out here: the first is having at least one other team member versed in the onboarding process. They can fill in the gaps if the main owner is on leave or is at capacity. The second is having the entire process clearly and methodically documented. This provides a template that every onboarding can follow – more clarity, less confusion.
What Goes Wrong Without a Clear Owner
If you’re looking for IT onboarding advice, you probably have a good grasp of how chaotic the process can be if nobody takes charge. These are some of the real issues that we often see in businesses that haven’t nailed down their onboarding procedure:
- Permissions get copied from other employee profiles rather than configured around the new role. The new employee then ends up with insufficient access to tools they need, or can see systems and data that aren’t relevant to their role.
- Security settings don’t get configured correctly or get skipped completely. Ideally, MFA should be active before the first login and all devices should be enrolled in Intune before the new hire takes possession of them. If you don’t have accountability over security, assumptions get made and steps don’t get taken.
- Day one becomes chaotic. Your new employee can’t communicate through Teams and Outlook, they can’t jump onto SharePoint, and they may not even have access to a computer. It’s a slow start and they don’t form a great impression of your business operations.
- Non-compliance ferments in inconsistency. If nobody is in control of your onboarding process, your records will reflect that. When its audit time, you may find you fall short of industry regulations. Adhering to stringent frameworks like ISO27001 will also be difficult if you don’t have a documented, consistent onboarding process.
Who Should Own IT Onboarding?
This depends on the size and structure of your business. In larger organisations with a dedicated IT manager, that’s where ownership will sit. They will communicate with HR, work from a clear checklist and sign off on each completed job.
If you’re an SME with no internal IT staff, then ownership is less clear. Office managers usually take it on but may lack the technical proficiency to configure licensing, security, device enrolment, and access settings correctly. You may find that there is no one on your team who can do that.
This is where a managed service provider like Smile IT changes everything. Your MSP takes over ownership and delivery of the IT onboarding process for each and every hire you make. They manage the technical steps, assume accountability and operate to the same standard consistently.
What a Properly Owned Onboarding Process Looks Like
The mechanics aren’t complicated. A well-owned process comes down to four things:
- A defined trigger point. When HR confirms a new hire, IT is notified immediately with the necessary details. That notification kicks off a checklist covering every required step before the employee’s first day.
- A checklist that lives somewhere permanent. It doesn’t rely on memory or tribal knowledge. Each item has a responsible party and a completion status.
- A clear handoff between HR and IT. HR provides the role details that determine access permissions. IT confirms when setup is complete. No guesswork.
- A review window after day one. Typically the first week. It exists to catch anything missed or changed since setup. Access requests that come in after the employee starts go through a proper approval process rather than being added informally.
Getting IT Onboarding Right with Smile IT
You don’t need extensive resources to handle IT onboarding well – you just need to acknowledge that the process is important enough to warrant full ownership.
If your business doesn’t currently have a reliable IT onboarding process, or if ownership of that process is genuinely unclear, it’s worth addressing before your next hire. The cost of getting it wrong is higher than the cost of getting it right. There’s security exposure, compliance risk, and lost productivity to think about.
At Smile IT, we work with businesses across Brisbane and beyond to build and manage consistent IT onboarding processes. With us as your MSP, your next hire’s IT onboarding will be stress-free and seamless.
Get in touch to find out more.
When he’s not writing tech articles or turning IT startups into established and consistent managed service providers, Peter Drummond can be found kitesurfing on Moreton Bay or hanging out with his family!