7 ways to use SharePoint to support employee onboarding

Dan Hawtrey
17 December 2025

Employee onboarding is one of the most critical workplace processes to get right. A person’s first day at a company involves completing various forms, meeting team members, and absorbing information. A successful onboarding initiative helps make the process more efficient, less overwhelming, and as welcoming as possible for new joiners – and has a tangible impact on talent retention, productivity, employee experience, and more.

Typically, an onboarding programme might continue from when a person is hired through their first 90 days or so, but can last longer, even sometimes extending up to a year.

Inevitably, onboarding involves using technology to streamline processes, support workflows, and facilitate remote interactions. The good news is that SharePoint and Microsoft 365 tools can support employee onboarding when used effectively. In this article, we’re going to explore seven ways that SharePoint can support employee onboarding.

What are the advantages of a successful employee onboarding experience?

A successful employee onboarding experience makes a difference. It reduces employee turnover and boosts talent retention in the period when employees are most likely to leave. And because many organisations fail to deliver a strong onboarding experience, it helps businesses stand out from their competitors:

SHRM data suggests that as much as half of employee turnover occurs in the first 18 months.
Research conducted initially by the Brandon Hall Group suggests that companies with a strong onboarding experience can expect a new-hire retention rate that is 82% higher than those without a strong onboarding programme.
Gallup research reports that only 12% of employees feel their organisation provides a “great” onboarding experience.

Additionally, a strong onboarding experience:

Ensures new hires can carry out their roles by getting up to speed more quickly, increasing productivity.
Supports streamlined processes for IT, HR, Learning, Compliance and other busy departments involved in onboarding new hires.
Reduces risk across various areas as employees understand critical policies and processes early on.
Helps strengthen connection, community and culture through a positive employee experience, all from day one.

How can SharePoint support employee onboarding?

Technology can play a significant role in driving employee onboarding by automating workflows, disseminating essential information and learning materials, enabling everyone to track progress, and more. A partly virtual onboarding experience also helps engage employees who are working remotely or in a hybrid way, and allows onboarding to happen even before day one.

Many organisations have invested in Microsoft 365. SharePoint, with some additional integrations from across Microsoft 365, can support employee onboarding in several ways. You can use SharePoint in some ways straight out of the box, but it gets even more potent if you use additional SharePoint-based solutions that enhance the experience; for example, the right policy management software can supercharge employee onboarding.

Let’s look at seven ways that SharePoint can support employee onboarding.

Provide a secure SharePoint site for new hires

SharePoint communication sites are excellent for disseminating information about a particular topic or targeted to the needs of a specific group. Creating a site that acts as a hub for new hires is an obvious starting point to enhance the onboarding experience. This could sit as a separate SharePoint site or sit as a site within your SharePoint intranet.

An onboarding hub should contain valuable information that new hires need to know regarding the company and its processes, its strategy and values, tools and apps, how to get things done and so on, including:

Checklists of tasks employees need to complete.
A welcome video from the CEO or presentations which feature in onboarding and induction sessions.
Access to key documents, including policies and procedures (more on this below).
Other valuable learning resources.
A calendar of all the milestones an employee needs to be aware of in their first 30 day.
A Viva Engage community to meet other new hires and ask experts questions.
And more!

Ideally, a new hire hub should include targeted, personalised web parts so new hires can access resources and links relevant to their location, department, and role.

In some cases, it can also be helpful to create a new site that new hires get access to even before their first official day. There is often a lot of paperwork they must complete before their first day, as well as information to provide and reading to do. When employees get access early, they can hit the ground running and ensure everything is set up for their first day.

Use SharePoint document libraries to distribute polices and processes

When a person joins a company, there is often a lot of reading to get through, some of which might be mandatory. A new hire may need to read the “HR handbook”, a professional conduct policy, an IT policy, a social media usage policy and a range of other HR policies. They will need to get to know specific processes, get to grips with SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), and more, and then continue to refer to these for their first few months.

One of SharePoint’s strengths is document management. It is excellent for distributing documents in structured libraries that employees can search or browse through. Embedding a document library with key onboarding documents on your new-hire site is an obvious starting point.

SharePoint, straight out of the box, can work well for presenting a few must-read documents within a SharePoint library. However, if you are a more complex organisation, in a regulated industry, or have global offices, you may need to use an additional SharePoint policy management solution like Xoralia. This enables you to target policies to different groups at scale and integrate with workflows for managing policies across the lifecycle.

Xoralia also has an instrumental “Collections” feature that lets you present policies spread across different SharePoint libraries as a single, structured collection to users – this is perfect for onboarding sites, which often need to display documents managed by multiple stakeholders across IT, HR, Legal, Finance, and lines of business.

Use employee attestation to support mandatory reads and track compliance

In employee onboarding, there will be mandatory policies, procedures and other controlled documents that a new starter must read. Support teams and individual managers tracking the onboarding process will want confirmation that a person has read and understood these policies. Reporting on these may also be critical for regulatory compliance and certification processes too.

The universally accepted way to monitor “mandatory reads” is through an employee attestation process, in which an individual digitally confirms that they have read and understood a policy. Reporting and analytics allow teams to track progress, issue reminders if necessary, and then report on progress for compliance purposes.

Unfortunately, SharePoint does not support employee attestation out of the box, which is a missed opportunity, as it is an important and popular feature for policies that are distributed through SharePoint libraries. It is possible to use custom development, combined with Power Automate flows and Power BI reporting, to create a targeted, mandatory-reads capability that ensures the new starter confirms they have read a particular policy. However, this requires a lot of effort, considerable cost and creates technical debt. If you use a SharePoint-based policy management tool like Xoralia, employee attestation comes straight out of the box, complete with:

A user-friendly interface already used by thousands of employees.
Comprehensive reporting to track success and ensure you are compliant- and audit-ready.
Notifications and reminders.
Built-in extras include the ability to apply custom quizzes to embed understanding.

Combine personalisation with automation and workflow

SharePoint is a powerful tool with native capabilities that support personalisation, automation and workflow. When these are combined, they can elevate your onboarding programme:

Combining granular Microsoft Entra ID data with SharePoint’s native targeting and personalisation capabilities means you can create targeted experiences that recognise new starters and their needs.
Using automation and workflows ensures new hires receive notifications and reminders about essential employee onboarding tasks at the right time.
Applying automation to reporting means you can track the progress of employee onboarding.

When we designed Xoralia, we built on SharePoint’s personalisation, automation, and workflow capabilities, so it is ready to support employee onboarding, policy management, and more.

Embed must-read onboarding policies into the flow of work

A key advantage of Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint is the integration among the suite’s tools, helping deliver a more unified and cohesive digital employee experience. This means you can provide essential resources to new hires directly into the flow of work, making their onboarding experience smoother and more intuitive. For example, many employees spend much of their working week in and out of Microsoft Teams, so providing the ability to view critical documents or details of key tasks that otherwise would be accessed through SharePoint makes a lot of sense.

There are many ways to configure onboarding resources across different Microsoft tools, for example, using Power Automate, Power Apps, or custom development. You can also use Microsoft Viva Connections to enable access to a SharePoint intranet within Teams.
A product like Xoralia also enables you to embed must-read onboarding policies easily into the flow of work through:

A unique set of enterprise-ready SharePoint web parts that embed personalised employee onboarding tasks and documents into your SharePoint intranet or onboarding hub.
A Teams app that brings employee onboarding directly into Teams.
A series of Viva Connections adaptive cards that allow you to embed onboarding into the Connections dashboard, which can work well for onboarding frontline employees using mobile devices.

Incorporate quizzes and learning to embed understanding

Learning is usually a considerable part of the onboarding experience. As part of the induction process, a new starter may need to complete a series of courses or training programmes to settle into life at their new company and carry out their role. Some of this learning is likely to be mandatory. Typically, it may include:

An introduction to the company, its strategy and core processes.
Health and safety.
How to use technology platforms.
Specific role-based training, often technical or specialist in nature.
Mandatory compliance training across different areas.

There are different ways to incorporate learning directly into your SharePoint environment:

You can easily link to Microsoft Learn resources that provide training on using Microsoft products.
You can use a SharePoint-based learning management system (LMS) such as Zensai’s Learn365, which integrates seamlessly with SharePoint.
Use Microsoft Viva Learning, a paid service which helps channel learning resources and processes into Microsoft Teams, including from SharePoint.
Using a feature like Xoralia’s custom quizzes, which require users to answer questions about a policy or document they have read to embed understanding, with reporting to track success.

Create a new hire community using Viva Engage and embed it into SharePoint

Meeting people and networking help new employees settle quickly. Creating a community for new starters is a strong element of any onboarding programme and a good way to engage them.

New hires can support each other and connect with HR and other support functions to ask questions. With SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365, a Viva Engage community with an embedded feed on your new-hire site in your SharePoint intranet can work very well. However, some organisations might prefer to use Teams for community interaction.

Designing employee onboarding using SharePoint

Employee onboarding is a key process in employee experience and can make a tangible contribution to talent retention. SharePoint is a strong foundational technology for designing onboarding experiences and delivering related content and features. However, adding a solution like Xoralia on top will make a significant difference and ensure essential policy management is embedded within your onboarding programme. Why not try a free Xoralia demo to see how it can help you onboard your employees?

Frequently asked questions

Can you use SharePoint to support employee onboarding?

Yes, SharePoint is a strong platform to help streamline employee onboarding. For example, you can use a SharePoint site to create an onboarding hub with all the information new starters need, leverage personalisation to target the right people, use SharePoint libraries to distribute onboarding documents, and take advantage of automated workflows to issue reminders of different tasks.

What is the best way to set up SharePoint to support employee onboarding?

You can use SharePoint out of the box in several ways to help with your employee onboarding. However, to deliver a more targeted, relevant and streamlined experience to deliver an effective onboarding programme you may need to use some custom development, use the Power Platform to configure workflows, or buy a product with features that are specifically designed to support onboarding.

How does policy management software support employee onboarding?

Employee onboarding usually requires employees to read essential policies and procedures. Policy management solutions such as Xoralia can help automate much of the work around managing policies required for onboarding and also facilitate employee attestation where new starters confirm they have read a policy. Reporting and notifications then ensure there is a high level of compliance.

The story behind Xoralia

Xoralia was built by the team at Content Formula, an intranet and digital workplace consultancy that has built SharePoint intranets for some of the world’s most famous companies. Now, most companies want their policies and procedures on the intranet but they don’t just want to store them there, they also want tools to help better manage them. Over the years we came across just about every single requirement for a policy management system. As this article above explains, there are gaps in SharePoint and so we never built what in our mind was the perfect policy management system.

However, one of our clients challenged us to build something for them that filled all the gaps but still used SharePoint at the back end. We had a great relationship with them and agreed to share the budget to do this, provided we could then market the solution to others. That was in 2019. We’re now on version 3 of Xoralia and the product has grown and evolved a lot.

3 benefits you can expect from Xoralia

Make it easy to find policies

Centralised policy library with powerful search and filtering.

Reduce administrative burden

Automations and notifications so that all policy tasks are carried out on time

Demonstrate compliance and best practice

Sophisticated tracking and dashboards to drive and measure compliance.

And lots more!

What our clients say

AppSource review

A great time saver and tool for document management

We have found Xoralia to be very beneficial to us as it has allowed us to focus on other area’s as Xoralia will take care of who has read the documents and notify them if they have not. A great time saver and tool for document management all together.

Tim Galer

IT Coordinator

Hughes

Ideal partner for our regulated environment

LifeArc operates in a strictly regulated sector where compliance and information security are critical. It is essential that LifeArc’s workforce have easy and effortless access to the latest up-to-date policies and procedures, which is the structure Xoralia gave us.

Adam Lythgoe

IT Manager

LifeArc

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