In a small agency, onboarding usually means the founder spending a chaotic first day setting up accounts, forwarding a few documents, and dropping the new person into a client project with "shout if you have questions". Then the founder gets pulled into a client call, and the new hire spends two days waiting for access to things.
It works, sort of. But it's slow, it depends entirely on the founder's memory, and it gets worse with every hire because the agency has more tools, more clients and more unwritten rules each time.
A written checklist fixes most of this. It means onboarding happens the same way whoever does it, nothing gets forgotten, and the founder isn't the bottleneck. Here's one built for agencies, studios and dev shops.
How to use it
Copy it into a document or task list for each new hire. Put a name next to every line. "We" is not an owner. The founder, the team lead, a buddy and the new hire themselves are owners.
Before day one
| Task | Owner |
|---|---|
| Signed offer letter and employment contract on file | Founder |
| Right-to-work and tax forms collected, per local requirements | Founder |
| Equipment ordered or shipped to arrive before day one | Ops |
| Work email account created | Ops |
| Accounts created for chat, projects, docs and design/dev tools | Ops |
| Access recorded: which tools and client systems, at what level | Ops |
| Buddy assigned (not their manager) | Team lead |
| First week's calendar sent: who they'll meet and when | Team lead |
| First small, real task chosen and written up | Team lead |
| Welcome message drafted for the team channel | Founder |
Two lines here get skipped and cause the most trouble later.
Recording access. Write down every system the new person gets into, including client systems. It feels like admin on day one. On their last day, whether that's in six months or six years, that list is the difference between a clean exit and a former employee who still has a login to a client's hosting. In Suprwork, Access & offboarding keeps this register, so the exit checklist builds itself from it when someone leaves.
Choosing the first task in advance. If you leave it to day one, it'll be "have a look around the codebase", which isn't a task.
Day one
| Task | Owner |
|---|---|
| Welcome call with founder: why the agency exists, who the clients are | Founder |
| Post welcome message, introduce them to the team | Founder |
| Check every account and login works | New hire + Ops |
| Walk through the tools: where chat, tasks, files and docs live | Buddy |
| Read the core SOPs for their role | New hire |
| Complete the first small task | New hire |
| End-of-day check-in with team lead: questions, anything missing | Team lead |
The first task matters more than anything else on day one. Pick something real but small, completable in an afternoon, with an obvious "done": fix a small bug, resize a set of assets, write up notes from a recorded client call. Shipping something real on day one tells the new person they're useful, which no amount of reading does.
First week
| Task | Owner |
|---|---|
| 1:1 intros with everyone they'll work with regularly | Buddy schedules |
| Shadow a client call | Team lead |
| Introduction to current clients: who they are, what's sensitive | Account leads |
| Explain how work flows: brief → scope → tickets → QA → delivery | Team lead |
| Explain how status is reported (daily check-in, board, weekly review) | Team lead |
| Assign to one project, with a defined piece of work | Team lead |
| First 1:1 with manager | Team lead |
| Friday: what's confusing so far? | Buddy |
The "how work flows" conversation is the one most often missed. Every agency has unwritten rules: who can talk to clients, what needs approval before it goes out, how revisions are counted, when to log time. New people learn these by breaking them. Tell them instead, or better, point them to the SOPs where they're written.
If they're joining a project that's already running, there's a separate playbook for that: onboarding someone onto a live project in three days.
First 30 days
| Task | Owner |
|---|---|
| Weekly 1:1s | Team lead |
| Owns at least one deliverable end to end | Team lead |
| Has read every SOP that applies to their role | New hire |
| 30-day check-in: what's working, what isn't, any surprises | Founder or lead |
At 30 days, ask: "What do you know now that you wish you'd been told on day one?" Add the answer to this checklist. Every hire makes it better for the next.
Days 31 to 60
| Task | Owner |
|---|---|
| Working on client work with normal supervision | Team lead |
| First piece of feedback given formally, in writing | Team lead |
| Starts estimating their own tasks | New hire |
| 60-day check-in: progress against what was expected | Team lead |
Having them estimate their own tasks, and then comparing estimates with actual time, is one of the fastest ways for a new person to learn the agency's pace, and for you to learn theirs.
Days 61 to 90
| Task | Owner |
|---|---|
| Fully independent on their core work | New hire |
| Client-facing where the role requires it | Team lead |
| End of probation review, with evidence of work done | Founder or lead |
| Decision: confirm, extend, or end | Founder |
| Agree goals for the next six months | Team lead + new hire |
Make the probation decision on evidence: work delivered, feedback received, reliability on what they committed to. If you've kept notes from weekly 1:1s and the person has done daily check-ins, the evidence is already there.
Make the process documents easy to hand over
The checklist above leans on two things most small agencies don't have: written SOPs and contracts that aren't rebuilt from scratch each time.
SOPs for the role. "Read the core SOPs" only works if they exist. Start with the three or four processes every new person touches in their first week. See how to write SOPs your team will follow. In Suprwork, SOPs can be assigned to new joiners in their first 90 days, and you can see which they've confirmed reading.
Contract templates. Keep one offer letter and one employment contract template, reviewed by a lawyer once, and fill them in per hire. Rewriting from an old contract each time is how mistakes and old salary figures slip through.
Common mistakes
No access on day one. The single most frustrating start a new hire can have. Do it before they arrive.
Too much reading, no doing. A day of documents is a day of forgetting. Mix reading with small tasks.
Founder as the only source of answers. Assign a buddy. New people ask buddies the questions they think are too basic for the boss.
No 30-day check-in. By day 30 the new hire has opinions about what's broken. That's valuable, and it fades fast once they get used to it.
Forgetting to record access. It'll matter the day they leave.
This week
If you have a hire starting in the next month, copy this checklist now and put a name on every line. If you don't, ask your most recent hire what they wish they'd been told on day one, and start the checklist with their answer.