Managing Employee Onboarding in Jira

Employee onboarding is always a stressful process. The hiring manager wants to get the employee working as soon as possible. HR doesn’t want anything to happen until all of the legal the paperwork is complete; and the employee just wants to have the space and tools they need to start their new job.  

Continuing with our series on business use cases, this article explores how you can use checklists (and a few other modifications) to add functionality to the Employee Onboarding Jira Work Management project template. Note that since employee onboarding requires a cross-functional team, this use case assumes that HR owns the project, and that members of the Facilities and IT teams can access the project.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• Product: Jira Work Management
• Apps: Issue Checklist for Jira
• Workflow & Issue Type: HR Onboarding project template
• Set-up Tasks:
• Workflow modifications
• Checklist Templates
• Automation rule

Employee Onboarding Project Template

The Onboarding project template creates an Employee issue type and a five step workflow.

Unless your company is fully remote, there’s probably some facilities provisioning that needs to be done too. After all, the new employee will likely need a desk, keys to the office, access to parking, etc. Since Facilities and IT can both be working on their tasks at the same time, and we’ll be using checklists to track exactly what has and hasn’t been done, you don’t need to create a separate status.

Also note that the default workflow uses global transitions - meaning there is no imposed order on how an issue moves through the statuses. That’s probably not good practice. Do you really want to give someone access to your IT systems before they’ve signed the a confidentiality agreement and NDA? And what’s the point of having a REVIEW  status if it can be bypassed?  A modified workflow might look like this:

The modified workflow forces the issue to progress through the statuses in the correct order, ensures that the issue must be reviewed before it can be closed, and accommodates that fact that sometimes reviews fail and work needs to be repeated.

Set-up

There are a few more pieces we can put in place in order to optimize the project:

Workflow Condition

The modified workflow ensures that an issue must be reviewed before it can be closed, but doesn’t specify who does the review. To ensure that the issue isn’t closed without HR signing off, use the User is in group workflow condition to limit the users who can transition the issue from IN REVIEW to ONBOARDED to members of the HR group.

Checklist Templates

HR, IT and Facilities will each have multiple tasks as part of the onboarding process. Using checklists will ensure that all tasks get completed and will make it easy to see what’s been done and what hasn’t.

• Ensure that the Enable multiple checklists per issue global setting is toggled on.
• Select Checklist from the left project nav bar and create three checklist templates listing the tasks for each team.
• Since the HR paperwork is the first step, set it as the default template the Employee issue type.
  
  

Tip: You can also add checklists that track the on/offboarding tasks for specific teams. See the example here.

Automation Rules

Since it is set as the default, the HR tasks template will be added to the issue when it’s created. You can create an automation rule to add the IT and Facilities checklists when the issue reaches the PROVISIONING status:

1. Find the custom field ID of the Checklist Template field.

2. Find the ID of the template to be applied by the rule. Templates are listed in alphabetical order and numbered from top to bottom. (In this examplee, the Facilities template has ID number 1 and the IT template has ID number 3.) Note that the template ID numbers are reset when the list of templates is updated. Therefore, you may need to update the automation rule if new templates are added.

3. Create a new automation rule:

a. Trigger: When Issue transitioned from EMPLOYEE DOCUMENTS  to PROVISIONING

b. Action: Edit issue. Click More options and insert the following, using the appropriate custom field ID and the appropriate template ID for the Facilities template.

{
    "fields": {
              "customfield_10044" : "1"
              }
}

c. Second action same as the previous one with the template ID for the IT template.

{
    "fields": {
              "customfield_10044" : "3"
              }
}

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4. You may also want to consider adding an action to notify the appropriate members of the Facilities and IT teams.

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Issue Life Cycle

1. The hiring manager creates an issue to let HR know they have a new employee ready to be onboarded.
2. The checklist of HR tasks was automatically added to the issue. The HR team transitions the issue to EMPLOYEE DOCUMENTS and begins work on the paperwork.
3. Upon completing the HR documents, the issue is transitioned to PROVISIONING. The Facilities and IT Checklists are automatically added, and the appropriate teams get to work.
4. When the all of the checklist items have been completed, the issue is transitioned to IN REVIEW.
5. HR reviews the issue to ensure that all of the onboarding requirements have been completed, then transitions the issue to ONBOARDED.