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Anyone who’s tried to onboard a new team member knows how chaotic and frustrating the experience can be—especially when introducing them to a powerful yet complex tool like ClickUp. What’s meant to be an exciting first step into a new role often turns into confusion, overwhelm, and stalled productivity. The culprit? A lack of structure and clarity.
Project management platforms like ClickUp offer incredible flexibility, but without a clear path, new hires are left wondering where to start, what to prioritize, and how to contribute effectively.
That’s where a well-designed team onboarding process becomes essential. Done right, it transforms a potentially overwhelming experience into a streamlined, empowering journey—ensuring that new team members feel confident, supported, and productive from day one.
Why SOPs Are Non-Negotiable for Team Onboarding
Before diving into your ClickUp setup, Yvonne emphasizes a critical foundation of effective team onboarding: well-documented Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Why are SOPs so essential?
Eliminate Guesswork: SOPs offer clear, actionable steps—no more repeated questions.
Ensure Consistency: Everyone follows the same process, every time.
Speed Up Onboarding: Let new hires self-serve, freeing up your time.
Minimize Mistakes: Written clarity reduces errors.
Save Your Sanity: Stop micromanaging and repeating yourself.
SOPs bring structure to what can otherwise be a confusing and inconsistent team onboarding experience. Yvonne also shares a video specifically on creating SOPs inside ClickUp—linked in her video description.
Team Onboarding Challenges in ClickUp
Even with good intentions, many businesses struggle with team onboarding in ClickUp for a simple reason: new hires don’t know where to start. Instead of a guided experience, they’re dropped into everything views or long task lists with no context. For someone new to project management, this can feel like being handed a novel and told to find a sentence—without knowing the chapter.
Without a clear onboarding flow, confusion reigns. Tasks seem unrelated, priorities are unclear, and anxiety builds fast. The solution? A structured and simplified entry point.
Create a “First Day Dashboard” to Transform Team Onboarding
Yvonne’s secret weapon for successful team onboarding in ClickUp is the “First Day Dashboard.” This personalized, centralized dashboard solves the overwhelm by guiding new hires from day one. Here’s what it includes:
Team Space Template: A designated HR-like space in ClickUp, with personal folders for each team member.
Getting Started with ClickUp: Quick video tutorials to teach ClickUp basics.
Company-Specific Training: Custom tasks tailored to your unique workflows.
Custom Folder Overview: The main onboarding hub, accessible via automated welcome email.
Welcome Video: A personalized Loom video that sets the tone.
Wish List & Support Cards: Let new hires share feedback and get help easily.
Linked SOPs: Provide direct access to role-specific SOPs.
Progress Tracker: Visual task tracking so everyone knows what’s done and what’s next.
Start simple. As your new team member grows into their role, the dashboard can be upgraded with advanced features and shortcuts to their most-used ClickUp spaces.
Automate Your Team Onboarding Workflow
ClickUp’s built-in features are powerful, but pairing them with automation tools like Make.com can take your team onboarding to the next level:
Automated Folder Creation: As soon as someone is marked “active” in your CRM, automatically generate their onboarding folder with all templates applied.
Email & Celebration Triggers: Send welcome emails, motivational comments, or team celebrations.
Scalable Systems: Standardize the entire onboarding workflow so you can onboard 5 or 50 people with the same effort.
Automation doesn’t just save time—it ensures consistency and a positive experience for every new hire.
Crafting the Ideal First Impression
Your team onboarding process is your company’s first impression. Yvonne’s advice? Keep it clean, supportive, and personal. Add a few welcome tasks, guide them through your ClickUp environment with video, and use forms to gather their feedback early on.
With strong SOPs, an intuitive dashboard, and automation to back it all up, you can scale your business confidently—without sacrificing the human touch.
Conclusion
Team onboarding doesn’t have to be a headache. With the right tools, structure, and automation, you can turn overwhelm into empowerment—making sure every new hire feels supported and set up for success from day one. Streamline your onboarding today, and watch your team thrive.
Want to skip the heavy lifting? Grab my ClickUp Team Onboarding Template: https://askyvi.tips/shop-team-management
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Video Transcription:
Yvonne Heimann [00:00:00]:
Ever onboarded a new team member. And the moment they saw ClickUp, they instantly just froze. Too many lists, too many tasks, no clear direction. And that’s why we streamlined our team onboarding system right here in ClickUp. And it’s essential to bring on new team members and running your business efficiently. And today I’m going to show you just how to build this step by step team onboarding process. Your new hires just knows exactly what to do, where to go and how to get started. It makes onboarding new team members a breeze and really enjoyable for everybody involved.
Yvonne Heimann [00:00:41]:
Hi, if you don’t know me yet, I am Yvonne Heimann, AKA Yvi, and I’m a business efficiency consultant and ClickUp verified consultant since 2018. And my goal is to show you all of these simple systems that allow you to scale your business without burning out. But before I start with this video and dive into our step by step process to onboard new team members, I’m going to call you out on another important step that funnels right into this and that is sops. Without clear, documented sops, the documents that tells your team what to do, how and where, your onboarding process will leave gaps. You need your standard operating procedures because it’s essential to remove guesswork. New hires won’t need to constantly ask you, how do we do this? How do I do this? Because they’ll have their step to step guides. It ensures consistency and you are not constantly doing things differently and wrong and how they’re not supposed to be done. Every team member now easily can follow the same exact process.
Yvonne Heimann [00:01:48]:
Nothing gets lost in translation. It also speeds up the onboarding. Instead of manually explaining everything, you point them to a sop. It reduces mistakes. Clear instructions means fewer errors and less forth and back. And it frees up your time because you don’t have to micromanage anybody. And who really wants that? Who wants to answer the same questions over and over and over again? So SOPs really turn chaos into clarity. And when paired with our team onboarding process and system right here in ClickUp, new hires just hit the ground running with zero confusion.
Yvonne Heimann [00:02:27]:
And they get everything they need to be the best they can be. And if you need help writing sops, I’ve got you covered. There will be a video in the description that dives deeper into all of this and how to write your SOPs right here in ClickUp. Now let’s dive into the team onboarding system. The reason why new team members really struggle in ClickUp is where do I even start? Especially if you are not bringing on A project manager, but any other position that might not have seen ClickUp before. Where, where, where do I even start? And they land on a list view or maybe your everything view. And it’s like I’m supposed to be doing all of this. Where, how, what, why? When they potentially have access to everything.
Yvonne Heimann [00:03:07]:
There’s no clear onboarding flow of introducing them. It’s like drop them smacked up in the middle of your business story rather than guiding them towards what you want them to do often enough. Just no simple str sops. The clearer your processes are, the easier the onboarding. And the fix for this is a simple dashboard right in ClickUp. We call it the first day dashboard. Now let’s take a look at this simple dashboard and then I’m going to show you how you can automate and optimize these things for you. As you can see right here we are in our team space template.
Yvonne Heimann [00:03:47]:
You might have seen this before. I have those in my template shop. It’s really simple where we have a team space. Think of it as your HR space. Every team member gets their own folder. Right here we have our getting started with ClickUp training. Quick little videos that make sure your team member knows exactly how things happen in ClickUp. And then we got company specific training.
Yvonne Heimann [00:04:11]:
You might want to add certain tasks or whatever else you can easily grow with this template. In the folder level. Again all of this follows clickups hierarchy. In the folder level you got the overview tab which we customized just for this use case of team onboarding. This is where we send new team members. They get an email and they’re like hey by the way, go right here and let’s start your onboarding process. That can be automated too. Then we have a little welcome video right on the top with a big start here.
Yvonne Heimann [00:04:44]:
By the way you can use emojis anywhere you want to add a little bit of gizmo to your text. This video is really start here. You walk them through, record a loom video of the different different things that they will see right here. Add a bookmarks card right here that allows them to make a wish if they are running into something where it’s like oh my God, I wish I would have a trackpad because it works better in my business setup than the mouse or oh my God, this process is really draining me. Can we automate this? Whatever kind of wish they might have to help advance your business and be better in their position. You might also have a ClickUp support form in here. If something doesn’t work right you want to collect those issues. You might want to have your standard operating procedures LinkedIn here.
Yvonne Heimann [00:05:41]:
Yes, we do have a template for you on that one where they can easily find specific SOPs that pertain to their position. We then have a simple list view underneath which brings in all of the lists in this folder and shows them how many tasks are in there and how much they have gotten done off that. You easily can add cards in here for example a document with your team feedback if you are doing monthly calls with your team members. If you are doing quarterly reviews, have a document in here with their records. You easily can calculate tasks or statuses, all kinds of things in here. However, I would slow your roll on this when you don’t want to overwhelm your team. When you’re onboarding, start simple and easy and then upgrade the team overview dashboard. Once they get used to things, take out the welcome video and maybe just add the calculation on how many tasks they have gotten done to be able to celebrate them and celebrate their progress in the upgrade of these client overview dashboards right here and ClickUp.
Yvonne Heimann [00:06:55]:
Think of it really as what do they need once they got past their first month and they are getting comfortable in here? For a video editor, you easily could add buttons and bookmarks to their favorite places of the video editing space, or maybe the content calendar, or maybe linking to the ClickUp locations of the clients that they are managing. And yes, you can automate these. So if you’re using our ClickUp CRM template to manage team members from them applying to them becoming team members, similar to how you manage leads till they turn into customers, yes, that’s possible. The moment they become an active team member in that CRM, you automatically can generate the team folder, name them and apply all of these templates. Now this is not not possible straight up in ClickUp, at least not at this point in time. However, that is possible using make.com and if you want to see how we automate the folder generation based on our CRM and when a team member becomes an active team member, let me know in the comment section and I’ll record the video for you. You easily also can trigger emails, you can trigger comments, you can trigger celebration messages to really support your team members within that first week and that first month of becoming part of your company. Now remember, when onboarding team members, the simpler the onboarding, the faster they will be able to integrate into your team.
Yvonne Heimann [00:08:42]:
Think about your team onboarding as your first impression. Clean, simple, supportive. Have a couple of welcome tasks. Get them using ClickUp right away have a video. Use ClickUp forms to really make this first week in this first month when you’re onboarding your team members engaging and give it that personal touch. And this setup especially once you automated it allows you to easily scale your business from 5 to 50. You can automate your repetitive tasks. You standardize your folder structure like you’ve seen in the video and use the same dashboard and just update it based on how long that team member has been with your business. Now you want to skip the whole setup and just be like done.
Yvonne Heimann [00:09:30]:
We actually have this team onboarding template including the ClickUp training in my shop for less than 50 bucks. You need SOPs, you need your standard operating procedures or your team onboarding is not going to work even with the greatest team onboarding dashboard right in ClickUp. So make sure you check out my SOP video with a template right there so that you can really get your standard operating procedures down and onboard. Happy new team members.
