Day 1 email

Greeting

As we’ve mentioned before, your greeting sets the vibe of your email. And since this is the first official email your new hire will receive as an employee of your company, make sure to convey how excited you are to have them with you!

Communication platforms

In order for your new hire to chat with their teammates, the People team, and anyone else they want to get in touch with, they need to know your team’s primary communication platforms and how everyone uses them.

One of the cool things we do at Sora is have every new hire create an employee “User Guide”. This is a documented note (i.e. in Slab or a Google Doc) that tells everyone what our main communication preferences are and how each of us uses the available platforms - including our CEO.

• Slack: This is what I consider to be most urgent. If you send me a Slack message, I’ll most-likely respond within 10 minutes (if not right away). 
• Threads: For long, detailed information that I need to read through thoroughly and respond to within the day, write a thread and tag me. 
• Email: I only check my email twice a day - once in the morning and once at the end of the day to prepare for the following day. If you want to communicate something non-urgent or an FYI that I can take my time to respond to, send me an email.

While we sometimes stray from these, it’s always nice to have the User Guides to go back and reference to make sure we’re respecting everyone’s time. And they’re living documents, so teammates can always go in and make updates to their preferences if anything changes.

First day schedule

Before they started, you sent their first-day schedule in your “before your first day” email. It’s a good idea to send it again to their work email morning-of. Or have it waiting in their inbox when they log in on day one, if their email is already active.

Resources

During your new hire’s first day, they’ll have multiple breaks to explore your internal wiki and other resources to find the answers to any questions they might have. Include the links in this email, and encourage them to explore the resources during their free time.

Example email

“Hey [Preferred First Name]! Welcome to [Company Name]! And happy first day! We’re so excited to have you on board and can’t wait to see you in action. 

To help you have a great first day, I wanted to give you some visibility into the best way to communicate with the team, your schedule today, and some resources you can check out in your free time.

At [Company Name], we primarily use Slack to communicate, and it’s usually our most urgent platform so expect a ping back almost immediately or, at the latest, in a few hours. Our next urgent communication platform is email, where you can expect a response back by EOD.

We have an exciting first day planned for you! You’ll be in student mode, soaking up a bunch of info about your team, our culture, and our mission.

Here’s your schedule: 

• Welcome chat/breakfast: 9:00 AM
• Get acquainted with tools: 10:00 AM
• Chat with manager about team structure/strategy: 11:00 AM
• Welcome lunch: 12:00 PM
• Benefits/I-9 overview: 2:00 PM 
• Break: 2:30 PM
• High-level product and industry overview: 3:00 PM
• Break: 4:00 PM
• End of day check-in: 4:30 PM
  

In your schedule, you can see you’ll have multiple breaks throughout the day. Obviously, feel free to recharge during those breaks, but if you have any lingering questions about anything, here’s a link to our internal wiki so you can find answers!

Let me know if you have any questions at all! Have a great first day, [Preferred First Name]!

[Manager’s preferred name]