Work an onboarding workflow

Denise started on Monday and her onboarding board is open on Tom's screen. This page is how to start a workflow, work its thirty-one tasks across five tracks, and read the board correctly, including the red banner that says she cannot start work.

Who can do this

• Front-line staff
• Site director
• Regional director
• Organisation admin
• Super admin

Any of these roles can tick any task on any staff member, including their own.

What you need

The staff record must exist. A person can have one workflow that is not finished or cancelled. Starting a second is refused.

The five tracks and all thirty-one tasks are fixed. There is no way to add, rename or remove a task, or to change a due date. The full list is on Fields and limits.

Due dates count from the day you start the workflow, so starting late squeezes the schedule. A workflow started in somebody's third week still has "Signed offer letter" due on day zero, which is that day.

Start it

Two routes, and the first is easier.

• From the message that appears when you add a staff member. It carries a Start Onboarding button. Press it.
• From the record. Open the staff member, then the Onboarding tab, then Start Onboarding. Choose the site and submit.

A message reads "Onboarding initiated".

Checkpoint

Five track columns appear, Background Check, Credentialing, Training, HR Admin and Health, each marked in progress with 0 tasks complete. The screen shows the track names without spaces. Overall progress reads 0.0% of 31. Above them a red banner reads Cannot Start Work: "Gate-blocking requirements must be completed before this staff member can begin working."

Work the tasks

1. Open the staff member's Onboarding tab.
2. Tick a task's box. A message reads "Onboarding task completed".
3. Repeat. There is no way to tick several at once or to reorder them.

The tracks run side by side, not in sequence. Nothing depends on anything else, and there is no order inside a track. You can tick "CHU clearance decision" before "Submit ECE portal application" and PTRS will not object.

Checkpoint

The task shows as complete with the time. The track's percentage moves. When every required task in a track is complete, the track is marked completed. Optional tasks do not hold it back. Three tasks are optional: Youth development orientation, Direct deposit enrollment and Medication administration certification.

Watch the banner

The banner above the tracks has three states:

Banner	When
Cannot Start Work, red	The gate condition is not met
Can Start Work, green: "All gate-blocking requirements are met. Staff member is cleared to begin working."	The gate condition is met
Onboarding Complete, green: "All onboarding tasks have been completed. Staff member is fully onboarded."	Every required task is done

The gate condition is exactly two things:

1. A completed task in the Background Check track whose name contains "fingerprint": either "Schedule fingerprint appointment" or "Complete fingerprint appointment".
2. Any one completed required task in the Training track, out of six.

That is a looser test than the banner's wording suggests. Read The banner is a display, not a control before you rely on it.

Read the board across the organisation

Open Staff, then Active Onboardings, subtitled "Track onboarding progress across all staff members". It lists every workflow that is in progress or not yet started, newest first, with the person's name, the overall percentage, the completed count and an overdue count.

A workflow disappears from this screen the moment it completes. There is no completed view and no filter. To find a finished one, open the staff member.

What PTRS records

Each task is recorded with the time and who completed it, and the workflow's status appears in the directory's onboarding column.

What this does not do

The banner is a display, not a control

Nothing in PTRS reads the banner before allowing anything

Nothing anywhere in PTRS checks whether a person can start work before letting them do anything. A staff member showing Cannot Start Work in red can be given a shift on Shift Scheduling today, put in a room, and counted in the staff-to-child ratio. The scheduling page never looks. The same is true of the background check's own answer.

Two further weaknesses in the condition itself. "Minimum required training is complete" is satisfied by one completed required training task out of six; ticking "CPR certification" alone clears that half. And the fingerprint half matches the word "fingerprint" in a task name, so it is satisfied by "Schedule fingerprint appointment": booking it, not doing it.

Treat the banner as a checklist prompt. Before somebody works with children, open their Background Checks tab and read the fingerprint date yourself.

A ticked task cannot be unticked

Ticking a task is permanent. One ticked in error stays ticked, and there is no way to delete a task or a workflow. A workflow started for a hire who never turns up cannot be cancelled either. It stays on Active Onboardings for ever. The blocked state a track can be in, with a note explaining why, cannot be reached from any screen.

The board does not show who ticked a task

PTRS records who completed each task as an account reference that no screen turns into a name. The task shows that somebody completed it and, in practice, not who. Use the notes box when you tick a task if the name matters. The one exception reads "system": a task ticked by PTRS itself when a background check clears.

No task is linked to the thing it names

Ticking "CPR certification" does not create a CPR credential, and recording a CPR credential does not tick the task. The same goes for the DEEDS tasks, the TB test, the health appraisal and the medication certificate. Everything is entered twice.

The one exception runs the other way. When a background check is recorded as Fully Cleared (Pre-Rap Back) or CHU Approved, PTRS ticks the first incomplete task in the Background Check track whose name contains "clearance", which in the standard set is CHU clearance decision, and re-checks the track. See Record a background check.

Six tasks can never be overdue, and the overdue alert reaches nobody

Five of the eight Background Check tasks, the four registry results and the CHU decision, and one Credentialing task, "DEEDS certificate verified", have no due date. A task with no due date is never overdue, never counts in the overdue figure, and is never seen by the nightly check.

For the twenty-five that do have due dates, PTRS checks at 3 am in winter and 4 am in summer and, for each newly overdue task, tries to email the staff member at their own address, which becomes a line in PTRS's log, and then marks the task as having been notified. That mark is never cleared, so each overdue task is processed exactly once, ever, and the record now says someone was told when nobody was. If email is ever switched on, every task already marked will never be alerted.

Use the overdue count on Active Onboardings instead. It is worked out live from the due dates and is right.

When PTRS refuses

What you see	What it means	What to do
An active onboarding workflow already exists for staff member '…'.	One is open	Open it from the Onboarding tab
No active onboarding workflow found for staff member '…'.	None started, or the only one finished	Start one
Onboarding task '…' is already completed.	Ticked twice, or in two tabs	Reload the tab
Onboarding task with ID '…' was not found.	The task belongs to a different workflow	Reload the record
A workflow for someone who never started is stuck on the board	It cannot be cancelled	It stays. Note it outside PTRS.
A due date is already past on a workflow you just started	Due dates count from today, and "Signed offer letter" is due on day zero	Expected

Related

• Add a staff member, where the message is the shortest route to starting one
• Staff fields and limits, the full task list and due days
• Record a background check, the one automatic link
• What happens automatically