A first-week plan for a new starter, from both sides

Background

Most first weeks go the same way. Day one is a warm welcome and a lanyard. Day two the laptop still isn't right. By Thursday the new person has read a lot of policies and met nobody they'll work with, and they're wondering if they've made a mistake.

Nobody planned it that way. Each person assumed somebody else owned the week. The manager thinks HR sorted it, HR thinks IT did, and IT didn't know they started on Monday.

I've been the new starter and the manager enough times to have opinions about all of it. This is a plan for week one, with a list for the new starter and one for the manager. By Friday the person should have done one small real piece of work, know who to ask for what, and have a plan for the next month.

Setup

Before day one (manager)

Do these the week before, not the morning of:

• HR's part. Check it's done: signed contract, right-to-work check (employers have to do this before the person starts), payroll details, mandatory training booked.
• Access. Laptop, account, email, the two or three systems they'll need on day one. If you can't get a system in time, say so in the welcome note and name what they'll do instead.
• A named buddy. Someone at a similar level, not the manager. Ten minutes a day, no agenda.
• A first real task. Small, finishable, useful. "Read the policies" isn't a task.
• A welcome note. Where to go, who to ask for, what time to arrive, which entrance, and a phone number for the morning of.

A checklist with an owner and a date against each line beats keeping this in your head. There's a short prompt for building one below, and a tip on why a checklist works better than a welcome email.

Day by day

Monday: arrive and feel expected. The manager meets them, shows them round, introduces the buddy, and walks through the week on one page. Lunch with the team if you can. Starter: ask what you don't know. Nobody expects you to know anything yet.

Tuesday: the how. How the team works day to day: where things live, how requests come in, which meetings matter. Starter: write down every acronym you hear and ask what it means. That list becomes a glossary for the next person.

Wednesday: the first real task. Pair on it with the buddy. It doesn't matter if it's slow.

Thursday: meet the people you'll depend on. Three or four short conversations of 15 minutes with people in other teams. Starter: ask each one, "What do you wish people in my role knew?"

Friday: look back and look ahead. Thirty minutes with the manager. What's been confusing, what's missing, what was better than expected. Agree the plan for the next month: three things to learn and one thing to deliver. A first-month plan from the job description gives you a draft to start from.

A prompt for the pre-start checklist

I'm a manager and [NAME] starts on [DATE] as [ROLE] in [TEAM], working
[ONSITE / REMOTE / HYBRID]. Build a pre-start checklist as a table:
Item | Who owns it | Needed by | Done?
Cover: HR items (contract, right-to-work check, payroll details,
mandatory training), IT (laptop, accounts, access to [SYSTEMS]), the
manager (buddy, first task, welcome note, week-one diary), and
facilities (desk, pass, parking) if it applies.
Give the owner as a role, and a due date counted back from the start
date. Where you don't know how we do something, write [TO CONFIRM]
instead of guessing.

Replace every [TO CONFIRM] with the real answer before you send it to anyone. The model doesn't know your process, so the list is only a prompt for you to check against it.