A new colleague’s first week, ready in one sitting

In many teams, a first week gets rebuilt from memory a few days before someone arrives. The new person then spends the first morning waiting for a laptop and the rest of the week asking who to ask, while their manager answers the same questions between meetings.

You can get the whole week ready in one sitting of about an hour. You write the facts once, on a fact sheet, and an AI assistant turns them into a checklist of everything to finish before day one (who orders what, and by when), a day-by-day first week with real work by day three, and a welcome email that sounds like you. The who’s who you copy straight from the sheet. It works for anyone joining a team: an employee, an intern, a volunteer, a teacher starting mid-year, a consultant joining a client account.

The assistant drafts and you supply the facts. Left alone, it fills gaps with generic advice and with tools your team doesn’t use, so every prompt below tells it to use only your facts and to write [ASK] wherever a fact is missing. Each [ASK] is a question you would otherwise answer on the new person’s first morning.

By the end of this you’ll have an onboarding pack in a shared folder, ready to send, the first week’s meetings already booked, and this week’s orders and requests sent.

What you’ll be able to do

• Finish today with five documents in one shared folder: the fact sheet, a checklist for before day one, a day-by-day first week, a welcome email and a who’s who.
• Spot the gaps, such as an account nobody requested or a key person on vacation that week, while there’s still time to fix them.
• Give the new person real work by day three, checked by Friday.
• Reuse the fact sheet, saved as a template, for everyone who joins after them.

What you need

• A role description or the job ad. If nobody is starting soon, invent a role to practice on, such as a part-time events assistant at a nonprofit.
• The tools and accounts the role uses, the people it works with, and links to any written procedures.
• A chat assistant such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot. A free account is enough.
• Your calendar, a shared folder your team can open, and about an hour.

While you practice, use roles instead of names (“the finance lead”), and read Before you upload a client document before you paste details about real people. The best time to do this is two or three weeks before the start date; with less notice, the checklist at least shows you what will be late.

Steps

1. Fill in the fact sheet. Copy the template below into a document and answer it in short notes, starting from the job ad and the last person’s handover notes. The lead times matter most: how many days an account or a laptop takes. Don’t stop to chase answers. Write a question mark wherever you don’t know, and the prompts will turn each one into a question for the right person.

2. Run the checklist prompt. In a new conversation, paste prompt 1 and your fact sheet. You get tasks, owners and dates worked back from the start date, with anything late or unknown at the top. Plan backwards from the date applies the same idea to any deadline.

3. Run the first-week prompt. In the same conversation, paste prompt 2. Its rules are the ones assistants break when nobody sets them. If the first real task on your fact sheet is still blank, choose it now: something small that someone actually needs, checked by Friday. For example, a support agent answers five simple tickets with a colleague reviewing each reply; a new teacher prepares one lesson from an existing plan; a volunteer enters last week’s donations; an analyst updates last month’s figures in an existing report. “Shadow the team” doesn’t count.

4. Write the welcome email and the who’s who. Paste prompt 3 with a short email you wrote recently, so the draft sounds like you. The who’s who needs no assistant: copy the People section of your fact sheet into the columns below.

5. Check every line. Search the drafts for [ASK] (Ctrl+F, or Cmd+F on a Mac) and answer each one. Confirm that every tool and document mentioned exists and that every person named is around that week, and delete any line that names nobody and produces nothing. As a second net, ask: “List every tool, document, policy or person in your answers that is not in my fact sheet.”

6. Book the week now. Send the invitations for every meeting in the plan today, while people still have free slots. If the new person has no work account yet, add “forward the first-week invitations” to the checklist. Send the requests due this week, such as the laptop order. Schedule the welcome email if your email app can, or set a reminder for the day it should go.

7. Save it as a template. Put the five documents in one shared folder named for the role and start date, then copy the folder as “Onboarding template” without names or dates. Book 20 minutes with the new person on the Friday of their first week and ask what they needed that wasn’t in the pack, and what they never used. Their answers go into the template’s fact sheet.

Templates to copy

The fact sheet:

THE ROLE
Job title, team and manager:
Start date, time and place (or video link):
Work schedule (days and hours):
What the role is for, in two sentences:
By the end of week one, they should have:

EQUIPMENT AND ACCESS
One line each: item | who arranges it | days it takes | done?
(computer, phone, keys or badge, email and calendar, every other
tool by name, shared folders, mailing lists, group chats)

PEOPLE
One line each: name or role | what they do | ask them about |
how to reach them | away during the first week?

MEETINGS
Recurring meetings to join (day, time, who runs it):
Introductions to book in week one:

PROCEDURES
Name and link of each one they need in the first month:
Tasks they'll take over that nobody has written down:

FIRST REAL TASK
Started by day 3, finished by day 5. What it is, who checks it:

Prompt 1, the checklist before day one:

Below is a fact sheet for a new colleague who starts on [date].
Today is [date].

Use only the facts in it. Do not add any tool, document, policy or
person it doesn't mention. Where a fact is missing or the sheet has
a question mark, write [ASK] and the question instead of guessing.

Make a checklist of everything that must be ready before the first
day: equipment, accounts, people to inform, documents, invitations
and the welcome email. Work back from the start date using the lead
times in the sheet. Answer as a table:
Task | Who does it | Done by (date) | Done?
Sort by date. Put tasks whose date has passed at the top, marked
LATE, then any task with [ASK] in it.

Fact sheet:
[paste your fact sheet]

Prompt 2, the first week:

Using the same fact sheet, and only its facts, plan the new
colleague's first five days. Rules:
- Day 1 starts with equipment and access, and has no more than
  three meetings, the welcome included.
- At least two hours a day stay unscheduled for reading and setup.
- Each day names one contact person for questions.
- The first real task starts by day 3 and is checked by day 5.
- Each day ends with a 15-minute check-in with the manager.
- Every item names a person, a document or a result. No generic
  items such as "get to know the culture".
- Write [ASK] for anything the fact sheet doesn't say.
Answer with one table per day:
Time | What | With whom | What to read or bring

Prompt 3, the welcome email:

Now write the welcome email I will send on [date], using only the
fact sheet and writing [ASK] for anything missing. Include when and
where to arrive and who will meet them, what to bring, the first day
in three or four lines, what they don't need to prepare, and how to
reach me before then. Under 200 words, written as me, [your name and
role], in the tone of this email I wrote recently:
[paste a short email you sent to your team]

The who’s who, one row per person:

Name | Role | Ask them about | How to reach them | When you'll meet

An example checklist

For example, here is part of a checklist for a made-up role: a support agent at a small online shop, starting Monday, November 2, with the plan made on October 15.

Task	Who does it	Done by	Done?
[ASK] Who sets up the phone line, and how long does it take?	[ASK]	[ASK]
Book the week-one meetings; check nobody is away	Team manager	Oct 15
Order laptop and headset (10 business days)	Office manager	Oct 16
Request email account (3 business days)	Team manager	Oct 26
Set aside five simple tickets for day 3	Support lead	Oct 30

The laptop has to be ordered the day after the plan is made. And nobody had written down who sets up phone lines: the [ASK] row makes that a question for this week, while the answer can still arrive in time.

What can go wrong and how to check

Generic filler

“Get to know the team culture.” “Explore the intranet.” Assistants write these because they fit any job, which is why they help with none. Every item should name a person, a document or a result; replace the rest with something from the fact sheet, or delete it.

A first day with no room

Left to itself, an assistant fills every hour, and by the fifth introduction the names start to blur. Count the meetings on day one. If the equipment isn’t working by mid-morning, nothing after it works either, so put setup first and keep the afternoon light.

Invented tools, policies and people

The assistant knows what most workplaces have, so it may send your new colleague to a handbook you never wrote or a chat tool you don’t use. The [ASK] rule cuts this down without stopping it, which is why step 5 checks every name against your fact sheet.

A tone stiffer than your team

Welcome emails written from scratch tend to sound like a letter from head office. The sample email in prompt 3 helps most. Then read the draft aloud, and rewrite any sentence you wouldn’t say to the person’s face.

Where to go next

Look at the line of your fact sheet for tasks nobody has written down. Pick one and get it on paper before the start date: The procedure only you know shows how to record it while you do the task, so the new person gets a document instead of a hurried walkthrough. At the end of week one, ten questions from your own material will show you what stuck from the pack.

Keep a list of the questions the new person asks that week. Most will come up again with the next one, and An FAQ page built from the questions you answer every week turns that list into a page. If you bring people in often, Set up your AI assistant once shows how to set up a project with the fact sheet and the [ASK] rule already in it, so next time you only paste the new facts.