How to Easily Simplify Your Onboarding Processes in Jira Cloud

First impressions are important. A company’s onboarding is no different. Onboarding is an important part of any organization’s work culture. It establishes the relationship between the organization and the employee. It sets expectations for further cooperation and fortifies the employee’s trust in an organization.

Getting onboarding wrong with an employee can be devastating. If a newcomer in a company has a bad experience in their first few days or even weeks, it can shape their opinion of the organization forever and in the worst cases, result in them leaving the company.

So how do we get these important steps in an employee journey right? How do we make sure that every time someone joins our company, they follow a specific workflow of tasks which is tailored to their role?

Enter Jira

If your organization is using Jira, look no further. As a first step, you could consider using the “New Employee Onboarding'' business project template to give your team a place to organize all onboarding work.

How to Easily Simplify your Onboarding Processes in Jira Cloud - new employee onboarding template in Jira

If you already have a project that you’d like to use, you could create a workflow and issue type for onboarding duties.

No matter the project, you could then create Subtasks within that issue type if you want to coordinate all of the onboarding duties related to one person. Every time a new employee joins your company, you can create the parent Task and its Subtasks, to keep track of everything, tailored to each role.

If you think your onboarding activities will take on a larger scope, it might make sense to use an epic to hold all the activities related to one user. You can then sort the Tasks into buckets of teams such as HR, management, finance, and IT related onboarding Tasks.

These simple solutions in Jira sound great, but they come with quite a large problem, we need to create the Tasks and their Subtasks every time. This is boring, slow, and just overall not a great use of anyone’s time. In a rapidly growing organization, such as a startup or company who recently acquired another company, this pain can be multiplied many times over. If you have 10 or even 20 newcomers to onboard in a week, creating all the Tasks and Subtasks manually would take too long.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could make a template of Tasks and Subtasks? Wouldn’t it be even better if we could create templates with Epics as well?

Easy Issue and Subtask Templates for Jira

There are a few ways to templatize Epics, Tasks, and Subtasks in Jira, but by far the easiest and most user friendly way is using Easy Issue and Subtask Templates for Jira. With the app, you can quickly get all your onboarding processes templatized depending on different use cases.

Let’s take the example of a larger organization for now, because this is likely the most complex scenario.

When our onboarding team takes a broad look at the landscape of activities they need to take on with regards to welcoming newcomers, they might seem overwhelmed. While that could be the case, if they create different templates for the different onboarding use cases, they can feel more in control of the onboarding Tasks.

In Easy Issue and Subtask Templates for Jira, users can create any template of Tasks they want. In our example, we’ve created the below onboarding Task templates.

How to Easily Simplify your Onboarding Processes in Jira Cloud - custom made onboarding task templates

Creating a new template in the Jira UI is as easy as selecting the Apps button in the top of Jira, then “Issue Templates”. From here we can add the various Tasks that need to be done for each person. You can see an example of some Tasks below.

How to Easily Simplify your Onboarding Processes in Jira Cloud - example of issue template with several tasks

If you want to build out a hierarchy of issues, using Jira Epics and Subtasks, you could do so if your target project has the issues available. Take a look at our next example.

How to Easily Simplify your Onboarding Processes in Jira Cloud - example issue template for HR, IT and Engineering

Here, each person’s onboarding activities are an Epic. Then within each Epic we have tasks which are distributed to the various teams who will work with this person. From there, each team can have their own set of Subtasks which they need to complete in order to officially onboard the newcomer.

Variables

If you want to take your templates to the next level, you can add variables to the form for when Jira users decide to create these templates of issues. The act of creating a variable creates a form for you to use when adding templates.

How to Easily Simplify your Onboarding Processes in Jira Cloud - adding variables to the template

Once you have set your variables, you can add them to your issue templates. The options are endless. For onboarding, the important information that you want to auto populate could be employee name, team, department, working location, role, and/or supervisor. There are some restrictions on which variable types can be added to which fields. Please refer to our documentation for more details.

Creating issues from a template

If creating the templates wasn’t easy enough, then creating the actual issues will be even easier. No matter where you are in Jira, you can click the “Apps” button at thed top and then “Issue Templates”.

From there, choose which issue template you would like to create.

How to Easily Simplify your Onboarding Processes in Jira Cloud - choosing an issue template to create - marketing onboarding template selected

Select “Use template” and complete the form. You will recognize the form fields which are based on the variables you created before.

How to Easily Simplify your Onboarding Processes in Jira Cloud - filling out variables

Once you’ve created your issues, you will see them in the first status of the corresponding issue workflow. In our example of Onboarding, we created an Epic for the person who needs to be onboarded then Tasks for each team with Subtasks that show their responsibilities.

How to Easily Simplify your Onboarding Processes in Jira Cloud - example epic for onboarding with template for all departments involved

Since we are using a Kanban Project, we would need to move the tickets to “Start Onboarding” section of the backlog. Once we have some Tasks there, they will appear on our board.

Create issues faster and easier

As you can see from our example, creating groups of issues with Easy Issue and Subtask Templates for Jira is fast and easy! We mentioned how important the onboarding experience is to newcomers in our first paragraph, with Easy Issue and Subtask Templates for Jira you can rest assured that each newcomer will get a consistent and positive experience when joining your company.

Easy Issue Subtask and Template will allow you to create any number of Jira issues across any issue types. If you don’t want to use Epics and Tasks to manage your onboarding, feel free to use whichever issue types you’d like.

As always, if you have any feedback or questions, feel free to contact us at Seibert Media. We would be happy to help.


Further Reading

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