New Manager Onboarding Plan Template

Before your first one-on-ones, ask HR for three records on each direct report. You want months at their current level, their last two performance ratings with dates, and their last two engagement survey scores.

Check how your survey reports results before asking for scores. The US Office of Personnel Management's survey of federal employees, for example, never gives an agency data that could identify one person's answers¹. If yours reports only group results, use the other two records alone. Use individual scores only if people gave them knowing their manager would see them.

Ask the outgoing manager for handover notes, and ask HR who left the team in the past year and what their exit interviews said. If someone joined recently, get their 30-60-90 day onboarding plan and take it over.

Then read the records one person at a time. A team average can look calm while two people are struggling.

Every direct report gets a first one-on-one in your first month; the records decide the order. The template checks each person for three warning signs.

Why these three? Engagement is something a manager can move: Gallup estimates that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement scores² across business units. An old rating means a year without a formal word on where someone stands.

A stalled career is a common reason to leave. In a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, 63% of US workers who quit a job in 2021 cited no opportunities for advancement³ as a reason.

Adjust the thresholds to your company. With reviews twice a year, a rating over 6 months old already means a missed one. Where senior promotions usually take 3 years, 24 months at one level may be normal.

Most people get four questions, in this order:

• What are you working on right now?
• What's going well?
• What's getting in the way?
• What do you wish I knew about this team that nobody has told me yet?

The last question brings out what no record holds, such as friction between two people or a process that quietly fails.

With a flagged report, open with what you noticed, not a number. Never read a survey score back to anyone; it breaks the trust the survey depends on. Ask what would make next month feel different, and end with one thing you'll do before you next meet, with a date.

Write down one specific thing each person said before you walk into your next meeting. Lara Hogan, a coach for managers and author of Resilient Management, also asks each new report how they like to receive feedback and recognition⁴. The answers start a document she keeps for each person.

After the first round, keep meeting. Gallup found that employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged⁵ as those whose managers don't. A one-on-one meeting template keeps track of what each of you promised.

Sketch days 1 to 30 once the flags are done. They're mostly meetings: your team first, then the peers your team works with most. Write days 31 to 60 after the priority one-on-ones, from what they turned up. In week one, agree with your own manager what they expect by day 90. Keep each phase to a page.

Make every item an action, not a theme. "Support career growth" gives you nothing to do on Monday morning. "Take Ines's promotion case to my manager by day 45" does. Before you take a case upstairs, test it against your company's promotion criteria.

Treat career and performance talks as core work. Google's Project Oxygen, which analyzed more than 10,000 data points about its managers⁶, lists supporting career development and discussing performance among 10 key behaviors of its highly effective managers. Their teams were more likely to have lower turnover.

To skip the spreadsheet work, choose Edit with AI at the top of this page. River lines up each person's records from your HR exports, flags who to meet first and drafts the 90-day plan.