New employee setup checklist

Who this is for: owners, office managers, and anyone responsible for getting a new hire working on day one.

The short answer

Onboarding is roughly a dozen steps, and it falls apart when it's improvised the morning someone arrives. Work through this list in order, and start it at least three business days before the start date so hardware and licenses have time to land.

Three days before

1. Confirm the details. Full legal name, preferred name, job title, start date, manager, and which existing employee's access most closely matches theirs. That last one saves an hour of guessing.
2. Order or assign hardware. A laptop in stock still needs setup time. A laptop being ordered needs a week.
3. Buy the license. Microsoft 365 licenses are assigned per person; you can't share one. Add any extras the role needs.

The day before

4. Create the account. Follow whatever email format you already use — firstname.lastname@ or first initial. Consistency matters more than the format.
5. Assign group memberships rather than granting file permissions individually. Use the "matching employee" from step 1 as the model. Individual permissions are how access sprawl starts.
6. Set up the mailbox. Assign the license, add any shared mailboxes and calendars, and add them to distribution lists.
7. Prepare the computer. Sign in once, install the standard software set, connect the printers, and confirm OneDrive folder backup is turned on so their desktop and documents sync from day one.
8. Set the temporary password and require a change at first sign-in. Send it separately from the username — text the password, email the rest.

Day one, with the new hire

9. Sign in and change the password.
10. Register MFA. Do it while they're sitting with you. Doing it later means it doesn't get done.
11. Show them where files live. Which folders, which are shared, and the rule that work is saved in OneDrive or SharePoint, not the desktop.
12. Test printing and scanning to their own email.
13. Set up the phone if they'll use one: Outlook mobile, Teams, Authenticator.
14. Cover the ground rules — how to report a suspicious email, that IT will never ask for their password, and the rule that payment detail changes are verified by phone.

Within the first week

• Confirm their files are actually syncing, not just configured to.
• Confirm they can reach every system the role needs, including any vendor portals nobody remembered.
• Check they're not sharing a login with someone. Shared logins are the single most common finding in small offices, and they make everything after them harder.

The step everyone skips

Write down what you did. A one-page record per role — which groups, which software, which portals — turns the next hire into a fifteen-minute task and makes offboarding possible. Offboarding without that record means guessing about access you can't see, which is a genuine risk when someone leaves on bad terms.