Your Onboarding Plan

What is an Onboarding Plan?

An onboarding plan is the first step to effectively and efficiently hiring, training and engaging new staff. The plan indicates what needs to happen, who will do it, and when it should happen. Farms that have developed organized systems for new hire paperwork, and that have developed effective systems for training and assessing new staff are more likely to have employees that are productive at work more quickly, with fewer accidents and errors at work. Farms that hire lots of seasonal employees or farms that, because of the nature of the work, have a lot of turnover will find that the upfront investment in developing better onboarding systems will pay dividends quickly.

Although much of the focus of onboarding for the first couple of days is filling in required paperwork and forms and doing mandated trainings, other aspects to onboarding orienting, welcoming, evaluating and documenting are also important. Every day should have a mix of activities. The faster you can get the employee actively doing their job and working with their team, the more quickly they will feel competent and connected to the workplace.

The materials below consist of the Onboarding Plan Template, which is a guide for your farm, a 4 week schedule in Excel that you can use to plan your month, and an Action Plan to help you identify a few key areas to focus on at first if you are overwhelmed.