Breaking down the many functions and processes of your HR department into projects and developing a project management way of thinking about them will improve efficiency and help your HR department to scale for your growing team.

A project is defined as a sequence of tasks that must be completed to attain a certain outcome. Because the process of employee onboarding has many different and often sequential tasks, it is a great example of an HR process to begin to consider a project.

So how do you begin to treat employee onboarding as a project?

• Assign a project manager. This will likely always be the same person for every new employee onboard-maybe an HR manager or whoever is responsible for the completion of the onboarding. If you have a small team there may be only one person responsible for all of the tasks of the project. If there are other team members responsible for parts of the employee onboard the project manager can assign them specific tasks. This is extremely important as you scale because it will be easier to delegate tasks as your HR department grows.

• Use a cloud-based project management app. Red Cedar uses project management applications internally to keep track of all of our accounting, HR, and recruiting tasks but also when helping clients create or improve their processes. One of the many benefits of using an app like Asana (which we happen to use), Monday.com, or Trello is the collaboration feature. Other team members and managers can view, in real-time, the progress of the project.

• Choose your style. There are 7 different project management styles. Not all styles will apply to all types of projects and not all apps will feature the use of each style. A great style choice to use for the employee onboarding project is Kanban. Kanban was designed in the 1940s by an industrial engineer to improve manufactory efficiency. Feel free to look into it. It's equal parts complicated and amazing but what is important to know in this case is that it allows anyone involved to view the stages of all of the tasks of the employee onboarding project.

Here is an example of an employee onboarding Kanban board

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