How to Automate Employee Onboarding with Microsoft 365

Looking for a way to make your employee onboarding more streamlined? While bringing a new employee into your organisation should be exciting, the paperwork-heavy onboarding process for HR managers and SMB owners isn’t.

Fortunately, Microsoft 365 offers a powerful suite of tools that can help you automate employee onboarding – saving time, reducing errors, and giving every new hire a smoother, more professional start.

Let’s explore what you can automate with Microsoft 365 and how our expert IT support helps your business build the right onboarding workflow.

Why Should Businesses Automate Onboarding?

Manual onboarding processes are not only time-consuming – they can also impact employee satisfaction and retention. In fact, a recent article highlights that over three-quarters of UK businesses plan to increase their budgets this year to enhance their workflows, including a focus on AI.

This strongly indicates an increase in businesses implementing automation into their processes to create a consistent, error-free experience where employees receive the right tools, documents, and training from day one – especially when it comes to onboarding.

It also frees up your HR and IT teams from repetitive admin tasks, allowing them to focus on more strategic work.

What Can You Automate with Microsoft 365?

Microsoft 365 brings together a powerful suite of applications that can simplify and streamline the employee onboarding process from start to finish.

With the right setup, you can automate a wide range of tasks, ensuring that every new starter receives a consistent and engaging experience – while saving your HR and operations teams hours of manual work. Let’s look at what you can automate:

• Welcome Emails via Outlook: Automatically send personalised welcome emails as soon as a new team member is added to your system. These can include login credentials, an introduction to their manager or team, helpful contact details, and links to essential documents or tools.
• Document Sharing with SharePoint: With SharePoint you can create a dedicated onboarding site or folder and then give new hires instant access to it. This can include employee handbooks, company policies, training guides, and benefits information, which are all accessible in one secure location.
• Task Assignments and Training Checklists in Planner: Microsoft Planner enables you to preconfigure onboarding task lists based on the new employee’s department or role. Tasks can include setting up their workstation, reviewing training videos, completing forms, or scheduling introductory meetings. Additionally, managers can track progress in real-time to ensure nothing is overlooked.
• Form Collection through Microsoft Forms: Collect vital information from new employees, like emergency contacts, bank details, equipment requests, and dietary preferences, using easy-to-complete online forms. The responses can then be automatically stored and shared with the appropriate teams, like HR, finance, and facilities.
• Automated Workflows via Power Automate: Power Automate for HR enables you to build workflows that trigger based on specific actions, like when a new user is created in Microsoft Entra ID or added to a SharePoint list. For instance, once a new hire is added, Power Automate can send a welcome email, add them to a Team channel, assign tasks in Planner, and send Forms for completion.
• Microsoft Teams Onboarding: Automatically add new starters to the correct Microsoft Teams channels, and even schedule or trigger welcome messages, introductory calls, or virtual onboarding events. You can also integrate Teams with other 365 tools so that their training materials, announcements, and communications are in one place.

A Simple Microsoft 365 Onboarding Workflow

Let’s look at how a typical onboarding workflow might look using Microsoft 365 and Power Automate:

1. We begin with a new hire being added to the HR system or Microsoft Entra ID.
2. Next, Power Automate triggers a welcome email via Outlook, a calendar invite to a Microsoft Teams onboarding session and provides access to a SharePoint onboarding folder.
3. Planner auto-assigns setup tasks (e.g., email signature, profile photo) and department-specific training sessions.
4. Microsoft Forms is sent to collect payroll details and preferred working setup information.
5. Finally, the manager receives notifications to schedule check-ins.

This level of automation ensures every new hire receives a consistent experience – no matter who their manager is or which department they’re joining.

How Athena Supports Automated Onboarding

At Athena, we help SMBs build smart onboarding solutions using Microsoft 365. We make automation accessible for every business, with no need for in-house technical expertise. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to upgrade an existing process, our team can help you:

• Map and design your onboarding workflow.
• Customise Power Automate flows to fit your HR process.
• Build Microsoft Teams onboarding experiences.
• Create central SharePoint hubs for new starters.
• Provide ongoing support and updates as your process evolves.

Contact Us Today

Automating your employee onboarding process using Microsoft 365 is one of the easiest ways to boost efficiency, reduce errors, and make a great first impression with new team members. With Microsoft Teams onboarding sessions and Power Automate for HR, the tools are already in your hands.

Still onboarding new hires manually? Athena helps you automate the entire process using Microsoft 365 – saving time, reducing errors, and giving new employees a smoother start. Contact us today for a free IT consultation and we can help you streamline it together.