Onboard a new hire
You hired someone. They start Monday. You need to do all the things — set up their email, add them to payroll, schedule a manager intro, send the company handbook. You will forget at least two. The Onboarding Playbook is what stops that.
The scene
It's Thursday. Ananya joins as a sales rep on Monday. You've sent her the offer; she's accepted. Now: payroll, accounts, intro to manager, employee handbook, first-week plan. You'll get to half of it before the weekend, the other half over the following week, and you'll feel mildly guilty about it.
The Onboarding Playbook gets you to 100% without the guilt.
The steps
1. Mark Ananya as starting Monday
HR → Add employee (or in chat: "Add a new employee: Ananya, Sales Rep, starts Monday, reports to Karthik, ₹6 LPA salary").
Fill in:
- Name, role, department, start date
- Reporting manager
- Salary structure (basic, allowances, deductions)
- Personal email (for the welcome link) + WhatsApp (for OTPs)
Tap Save.
2. Run the Onboarding Playbook
In chat or from the new-employee record:
Run the Onboarding Playbook for Ananya.
The Playbook scaffolds 14 days of steps:
Day -3 (Friday before start)
- Send welcome email with handbook + first-week plan
- Provision thola account (auto)
- Add to payroll (with confirmation)
- Add to relevant chat channels
Day 0 (Monday)
- 9 AM: Schedule manager 1:1 (auto-creates calendar invite)
- 10 AM: Send the "first hour" message in the new hire's language
- 5 PM: Daily check-in — "How was day one?"
Day 1–7
- 10 AM each day: Quick daily check-in
- Day 3: Manager 1:1 follow-up
- Day 5: HR check-in
- Day 7: First-week feedback form
Day 8–14
- Twice-weekly check-ins
- Day 10: Manager 30-day plan review
- Day 14: Mark onboarding complete or extend
3. Confirm each step
Most steps run automatically. Some pause for your confirmation:
- Provisioning — you confirm the email address and role
- Payroll entry — you confirm the salary structure
- First-week plan — you can edit before send
Tap Confirm for each pause. The Playbook continues.
4. Watch from Home
The Playbook run appears on Home for both you and the manager (Karthik) until it completes. You can ask the Planner:
How is Ananya's onboarding going?
You'll get a status: which steps are complete, which are pending, whether Ananya has responded to the daily check-ins.
5. The Day-14 close
On day 14, the Playbook asks you to mark onboarding complete or extend. Mark complete; Ananya transitions from "Onboarding" to "Active" employee. She continues to appear in the Team dashboard, gets her first payslip on the next pay-run date.
The gotchas
The "first hour" message is the highest-impact one
Onboarding-day-one messages tend to be either too corporate ("Welcome to the team! Here are 47 documents to read") or too vague ("Hi! Excited to have you!"). The Playbook drafts one in your workspace's tone — short, warm, with a specific first task ("Read this 3-page intro doc, then schedule a 30-min call with Karthik for tomorrow morning"). Edit before send if needed.
Don't skip the daily check-ins
Founders often think the daily check-ins are too much, then disable them, then are surprised when the new hire is quietly drifting in week two. The check-ins are 30 seconds for the employee. They surface early problems. Keep them.
Customise the Playbook once for your workflow
The shipped template is generic. Most workspaces edit it once (add an IT-equipment-pickup step, remove a step you don't need) and save as their workspace's onboarding default. Then every future hire uses your version.
→ See: Customise a Playbook
Salary structure is locked once payroll runs
Once Ananya's first payslip is generated, you can change her salary structure for future months but not retroactively. Set it correctly at the start. The Playbook walks you through this carefully.
What you'll feel after a few hires
Three things settle:
- Onboarding stops being a panic — the Playbook is your checklist
- New hires settle faster — daily check-ins catch the "I have no idea what I'm doing" moments early
- HR's role shifts from "did we do every step?" to "what's the actual quality of this hire's first month?"
Offboarding
When someone leaves, run the Offboarding Playbook (same template family). It handles:
- Final settlement calculation
- Access revocation (immediate or scheduled)
- Knowledge transfer to manager
- Exit interview form
- Final payslip
→ See: Offboarding
What's next
- Run payroll — your new hire's first payslip is the next milestone
- Approve a leave request — once they request their first leave
- Reference → HRM — the deeper HRM model