Onboarding Best Practices

This Guide shares best-practice information and tips & tricks for how to use Happeo to onboard new employees as well as some advice on setting up and maintaining your Google Workspace environment.

Google Workspace Best Practices

Users’ experiences in Happeo are mainly defined by their Group membership in Google.

Google Groups are essentially mailing lists that group users together based on an organization’s wishes. These groups are used as distribution lists for access to apps, content, and other things. In Happeo, these Groups can be invited to Channels and Pages.

Typically, people build Google Groups based on office locations, functions, and specific workgroups. For example:

• office@company.com
• or department@company.com

We also recommend building an all@company.com email to invite people to Company-Wide News Channels. This is important for efficiency in Happeo (especially in organizations of 100+ people) because when somebody joins the organization, by making them a member of the right Google Groups, you can ensure that they have access to the right apps as well as the best experience in platforms such as Happeo.

For more information regarding Google Groups, please see this article.

In addition to Google Groups, it is worthwhile to ensure that all information in a user’s profile is correct in Google Workspace. This includes information such as:

• Name
• Job title
• Email
• Phone number
• Manager field (builds organization charts)

This is because using our People search, you can look for anybody in the organization based on these factors and they are used to populate User Profiles in Happeo.

Any Google Workspace profile image will also be pulled through, although users also have the ability to upload their own image for Happeo.

Best practice for Happeo

If you want to leverage the full user search experience in Happeo, it is advised that new joiners add some additional information to their profile.

They can add their birth date, description, and skills. If the person adds skills that could be relevant to their or other people’s work (e.g. Photoshop, data management, video editing, etc.) then people can also search for these skills in People Search. 

For more information, you can check out these articles: User Profiles & Search for People in Happeo.

Building content in Happeo to help onboard new employees

There are two major ways to use Happeo as a platform to onboard new employees:

1. Build a Page that contains an overview of a few important factors such as:
   1. The User Profile for the contact point of new joiners. (e.g. HR managers, training professionals, etc).
   2. Documents that are important for new joiners (either a manually built File List widget or a Google Drive Folder specifically built for new joiners)
   3. An onboarding survey (embedded as a Google Form) or check-list (can be a form or a Google Sheet)
   4. An overview of the software products/platforms that all employees use, possibly segregated by function
   5. A guide for how to use Happeo with some best practices built for your organization. This could include an overview of links to the different parts of the platform (the Pages and Channels in there)
   6. An overview of the departments and office locations of the organization. You could include org charts and small sections on each department or just link to the dedicated Pages for these functions and locations.
2. Build a Channel that contains announcement posts. Each new joiner is invited to the Channel (through a Group or manually). They must confirm each announcement as read and then complete the steps in the announcements. You can also add any external links to the “Channel Links” section and any necessary files to the “Channel Files” section