New Employee Onboarding Solution Accelerator

Guide. Engage. Connect.

Planning, implementing, and managing an onboarding experience for new employees is time consuming and challenging. For organizations, its difficult to effectively onboard new employees into the complexity of an organization’s structure, people, processes, and culture. Only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new employees [Source: Gallup, State of the American Workplace, 2017]. For new employees, the onboarding experience is often exciting, but can also be stressful, overwhelming, and inconsistent.

To improve your new hire experience, implement the New Employee Onboarding (NEO) Solution Accelerator built on SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Lists. The NEO Solution Accelerator helps organizations:

Guide new hires through a curated and consistent onboarding journey
Provide new employees resources, support, and general information
Connect new employees to colleagues, community, and culture
Get feedback on the impact of your new employee onboarding program and how it can be improved

The NEO Solution Accelerator includes

A fully configurable and customizable set of new hire sites built on SharePoint communication sites: The NEO sites bring together the sites, information architecture, design, user interface and webparts to help provide new hires with a great onboarding experience. The NEO sites include a pre-onboarding, corporate onboarding, and departmental onboarding site template.
Onboarding checklist: Onboarding can be an overwhelming experience for new hires with everything the new hire is typically expected to do and learn. Avoid overwhelming your new employees by providing them a curated onboarding journey that paces the new hire through a configurable activity list of onboarding to-do’s.
A fully configurable and customizable NEO Teams app template: Take all new hires through a consistent onboarding experience that you can easily configure. The NEO Teams app template acts as a virtual onboarding buddy for new hires, nudging them along a prescribed onboarding journey, helping them connect with new colleagues and making it easy for their managers to introduce them to the organization. The NEO Teams app template also helps HR measure the effectiveness of their onboarding process and get new hire feedback on how it can be improved.
Mobile ready: The NEO sites and NEO Teams app can be easily accessed on mobile devices so your new hires can continue their onboarding from wherever they may be working.

Watch video to learn more about the NEO Solution Accelerator

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An engaging and well-organized NEO process can make all the difference in helping a new hire navigate through an exciting – but stressful – career journey, and it can have major organizational benefits:

Improve new hire performance and time to productivity – Organizations with a standard onboarding process report 50% greater new-hire productivity.[1]
Improve new employee retention – 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they had a great onboarding experience.[2]

[1] SHRM, Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Good Onboarding, 2017
[2] SHRM, Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Good Onboarding, 2017

Get started on improving your new employee onboarding experience!

Install the NEO Sites SharePoint site templates and configure to meet your requirements following the NEO sites step-by-step instructions.
Install and configure the NEO Teams app template
Ask questions or report an issue with the NEO Solution Accelerator to the service forum. Please note the NEO Solution Accelerator is an open-source project that is supported through the Teams forum. It is not covered by any existing Microsoft support contract.
Provide us feedback. Our solution is only a success if it is enabling your business outcomes. Please help us make it better by giving us feedback

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do I need both the SharePoint site templates and the Teams app template portions of the solution

While it is not mandatory for both the SharePoint site and Teams app templates to be installed (both can work without the other), we do recommend using both to provide the best experience for new hires. The SharePoint based sites hub provides new hires with a single and tailored destination where they can go to find relevant information. The NEO Teams app template takes new hires through a structured onboarding journey and helps them build their network.

The NEO Teams app template does require the Microsoft List based New Hire Checklist and New Hire Question List from corporate onboarding SharePoint site template. These lists are included in the NEO site template package available on the SharePoint lookbook.

How can I connect the SharePoint sites and Teams app template to provide a coherent onboarding experience to new hires?

The SharePoint based NEO sites and Teams app template have been designed to work together so new hires can have the best onboarding experience. There are two main ways to connect these two experiences:

Bring the NEO SharePoint sites into the NEO Teams app as a Tab. New hires will be able to access your new employee onboarding SharePoint sites from within the NEO Teams app. Follow the instructions on how to tab a SharePoint site in Microsoft Teams. We recommend tabbing specific pages from the NEO hub in Teams, rather than the entire site.
Use a view only version of the onboarding checklist on the new employee onboarding SharePoint site so new hires can discover the overall journey. The onboarding checklist is required for the NEO Teams app template to guide new hires through your onboarding journey.

Are there any fees associated with the solution?

There are no costs associated with use of both the SharePoint site and Teams app templates provided you are licensed to use SharePoint and Teams within your organization. Once the NEO app template is activated for new hires to use, Azure usage fees powering the Teams app’s bot are applicable. These are estimated to be USD 75/1000 active users. Active users include New Employees, their managers and HR team Coordinating New employees’ onboarding journey.

Review Cost estimate documentation for complete details on Azure resources

What languages does the NEO solution accelerator support?

The SharePoint site templates are English only. You can use the multilingual publishing feature of SharePoint to provide your new hire sites in multiple languages.

App Templates come with localization support and can be used in other languages easily to pick up Teams languages. We are also going to update more language strings in this quarter. When localizing your Teams app, there are 3 major areas you need to consider –

Your AppSource listing (if you’re publishing to the app store)
The end-user facing strings in your app manifest (for example bot commands)
Responding to localized text submitted from your users

All apps are supported and provided with a resource (.resx) file, which will be used based on current user locale. The resource file contains strings used by application. Hence, Teams app templates will pick up the language of the user’s Teams’ application.

Bot command and messaging extensions tabs are pre-configured values provided in manifest file. Localization of such files will be handled by translating the localization Info into the required language.

Please review the taking it further section to know more about how partners can easily customize applications.