Employee onboarding checklist for small business (UK)

A new person starts on Monday. Before they walk in, there are a few things UK law expects you to have done, and a longer list of ordinary things that decide whether they still want the job by Christmas. This employee onboarding checklist for small business owners covers both, in the order you’ll need them.

What this employee onboarding checklist for small business covers

A quick word before the lists. We aren’t solicitors, and this isn’t legal advice. We’ve only included the legal steps we’re sure apply to most UK employers. The details depend on the job and the person, and the rules do change, so check GOV.UK and ACAS for the current version before you rely on any of it.

Before day one

This is the stage people skip, usually because the offer was accepted on a Wednesday and the start date is the following Monday, and it’s also the stage where nearly all of the legal work sits.

The legal essentials:

• Check they have the right to work in the UK, and do it before their employment starts. Keep a dated record of the check. GOV.UK explains which documents count and when you can use the online check with a share code.
• Make sure you have employer’s liability insurance that covers them. Most employers need it by law as soon as they take someone on; GOV.UK lists the few exemptions.
• Get the written statement of employment particulars ready. It has to be given to them on or before their first day. ACAS has a template and a list of what it must include.
• Ask for their P45 from their last job. If they haven’t got one, send them HMRC’s starter checklist to fill in. You need one or the other to put them on payroll with the right tax code.
• Work out whether they’ll need to be auto-enrolled into your workplace pension. It depends on their age and earnings, and The Pensions Regulator’s guidance walks you through the assessment.

The practical bits:

• Tell the team who’s starting and when.
• Set up their email and any accounts they’ll need, and test the logins yourself.
• Sort the kit: laptop, phone, keys, fob, uniform, safety boots, whatever the job needs.
• Pick a buddy who isn’t their manager, someone they can ask the daft questions.
• Send them a short note saying where to go at 9am, where to park and who’ll meet them.
• Write down what their first week looks like, even roughly.

That note about parking sounds trivial. It’s probably the thing new starters worry about most on Sunday night, and it takes you two minutes.

Day one

The aim of day one is that they go home knowing where things are, who people are, and having done one real piece of work.

• Give them the written statement, if it hasn’t already gone out.
• Walk them round: fire exits, first aid kit, toilets, the kettle, where the bins go out.
• Go through anything safety-related for your workplace, and write down that you did.
• Introduce the buddy.
• Check every login works while you’re standing next to them.
• Give them one small, real job they can finish today.
• Make sure someone has lunch with them.

The small real job matters more than it looks. For a new office assistant it might be booking the van’s service. For an apprentice on a building site it might be the materials count for one room. Something with an end to it, so that when they get home and someone asks how the first day went, they’ve got a better answer than “I watched other people work and filled in forms all day”.

Week one

By the end of the first week they should be doing parts of the job on their own and know who to ask about the rest.

• Let them shadow the people whose work touches theirs, for an hour each, not a whole day.
• Give them their first proper task with a due date and let them own it.
• Chase the P45 or starter checklist if you haven’t got it.
• Complete the pension assessment and tell them in writing what happens next.
• Friday: twenty minutes with their manager. What’s confusing? What’s missing?

That Friday conversation is the one we’d protect above everything else on this list. People forgive a messy first week if someone asks them about it and fixes one thing.

First month

• Check their first payslip with them. Wrong tax codes are common and much easier to fix early.
• Make sure any pension enrolment has actually happened and they know how to see it.
• Train them properly on the systems they use every day, not just the login.
• Agree two or three things they should be doing well by the three-month mark.
• Hold a one-to-one at the end of the month.

Three months

This is often where a probation period ends, if the contract has one. Treat it as a proper review and not a formality.

• Go back to the goals you agreed in the first month, one by one.
• Ask them what they’d change about their first three months.
• Confirm the outcome of any probation in writing.
• Update your checklist with whatever was missing this time.

The last one is how the list gets better. The first time you use it, somebody will spend day one without a key to the side gate. Add it to the list.

Keeping the checklist as a task template in Klusko

A checklist in a Word document works fine until you have two people starting in the same month, with copies of the file on different laptops and nobody quite sure whether the second person’s P45 ever turned up. Keeping it as tasks means each starter has their own copy with a name on every step.

This is how we’d set it up in Klusko. Make a project called “Onboarding” in your Company workspace. Create one task per stage (“Before day one”, “Day one”, “Week one”, “First month”, “Three months”) and put the checklist items in as subtasks. Then save each of those five tasks as a task template.

When someone new is hired, create the five tasks from the templates, add the person’s name to each title (“Week one: Joanna”), and set the due dates by counting forward from their start date, which takes a couple of minutes and is the only part you have to do by hand each time. Assign each stage to whoever runs it. Before day one might belong to the owner. Day one and week one usually sit with their line manager. Tasks in Klusko have one assignee, so there’s never a question about who’s meant to be chasing the P45.

A “start date” custom field on the Onboarding project means every stage carries the date it was counted from. The Calendar view shows every stage’s due date across all current starters, which is handy when two people start a week apart. And on their first morning you invite them to the company account by email; their Today view then shows what’s on their plate, starting with whatever you’ve assigned them.

One caution. Copies of passports and other right to work documents are personal data, and only people who need them should be able to see them. Decide where those records live before you start collecting them, and keep them out of general task comments. Our security page explains how Klusko stores data (in the EU, encrypted), but that doesn’t replace deciding who should have access.

Task templates are on the Team plan. During early access every plan is free, and there’s more on how this works for different teams on our employee onboarding page. The tasks page covers subtasks and templates in more detail, and pricing has what changes when billing starts.

If you already run a weekly meeting, add “new starters” as a standing line for their first month. Our weekly meeting agenda has a notices slot that fits it.

Questions